In a surprising turn of events on June 1st, President Donald Trump announced the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement. This landmark accord, signed by 194 countries, aimed to collectively combat climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and limiting global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius. The decision sparked global outcry, with critics arguing it could jeopardize international efforts towards environmental sustainability.
President Trump justified the withdrawal, citing potential economic losses and job cuts due to compliance costs. Under the agreement’s terms, the earliest effective withdrawal date for the U.S. falls just after the 2020 presidential election, leaving a window for continued participation and reporting of emissions data to the United Nations.
This move has not only drawn sharp criticism from political and business leaders worldwide but has also reignited discussions around global cooperation and the implications of unilateral actions in international relations. Many liken this scenario to the classic “Prisoner’s Dilemma” from game theory—a situation where individuals, acting in self-interest, unintentionally create suboptimal outcomes for themselves and others.
The Prisoner’s Dilemma illustrates a paradox where cooperation between parties would yield the best collective outcome, but the incentive to defect (in this case, withdraw from the agreement) appears stronger due to perceived short-term gains or reduced costs. This dilemma mirrors the current global climate debate: each country faces the temptation to free-ride on others’ commitments while minimizing their own contributions.
However, the long-term consequences of such actions could be severe. Climate change knows no borders, and its impacts—rising sea levels, extreme weather events, and ecological disruptions—affect all nations regardless of their individual policy stances. The Paris Agreement was designed not just as a set of targets but as a framework for ongoing collaboration and mutual accountability in tackling a shared global challenge.
Moreover, the withdrawal of a major emitter like the U.S. poses practical challenges. Despite efforts by other nations to uphold their commitments, collective action becomes increasingly difficult without meaningful participation from all major stakeholders. This situation underscores the fragility of global agreements and the necessity for robust mechanisms to enforce compliance and ensure fairness.
Looking forward, the dilemma prompts a critical question: Can nations find a path back to cooperation despite the allure of short-term gains and the complexities of global politics? Game theory suggests that sustainable cooperation is possible when there are clear incentives and effective mechanisms to deter defection. In the context of climate change, this would require renewed dialogue, strengthened international partnerships, and perhaps revisiting frameworks that promote mutual benefits and shared responsibilities.
As we approach World Environment Day, the urgency to address climate change has never been greater. It calls for leadership grounded not only in national interests but also in a collective responsibility towards future generations. The concept of a “Nash equilibrium” in game theory—a state where no player can improve their position by unilaterally changing their strategy—offers a compelling metaphor for achieving sustainable global cooperation on climate issues.
Nash Equilibrium is a fundamental concept in game theory where each participant in a strategic interaction chooses their best possible strategy given the choices of others. It’s a state where no player can improve their own outcome by unilaterally changing their strategy while others keep theirs unchanged. Named after mathematician John Nash, it provides a stable solution in scenarios ranging from economics and politics to evolutionary biology. Understanding Nash Equilibrium helps predict behaviour in competitive situations and strategize effectively in complex decision-making contexts.
In conclusion, while the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris agreement represents a setback, it also serves as a rallying call for renewed commitment to climate action on a global scale. By embracing the principles of cooperation, transparency, and shared responsibility, nations can transcend the pitfalls of the Prisoner’s Dilemma and forge a path towards a more resilient and sustainable future.
Together, let us strive for a global consensus—a Nash equilibrium—where the pursuit of economic prosperity aligns harmoniously with environmental stewardship. The time for decisive action is now, for the sake of our planet and generations to come.
What trump is doing will have looooong term effects. America will curse him at end of 4 yr term. New president will have lot to undo than new to be done. Even internationally future generations will curse him for what he has sacrificed for short term goals.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks Sharat. President Trump has to come to renegotiate the terms of Paris accord. The U.S. always had its concerns. President Obama signed an executive order confirming the US’s adoption of the agreement, but he didn’t submit it to Congress for approval. That’s how President Trump is able to “cancel” the US’s commitment to the accord. But President Trump simply cannot isolate the U.S. from any world forum. Climate and environment must be preserved for our future generations. The U.S. government and other governments must find a new solution with shared responsibilities.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Dilemma of rest of the world, very well explained. Interestingly, lot of people and corporations in US are against the President’s stand on the subject and has pledged to continue with the effort in minimising the greenhouse gas phenomenon. It would be interesting to see how it works out.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Thanks Aranjit. You’re right. The planet is moving towards a low-carbon future, with or without President Trump. China now leads the world in renewable energy. Much of America remains committed to fighting climate change. Global investors are betting their money on a low-carbon future. The U.S. is already moving away from coal. Consumers around the world are taking the environmental and social impacts of their buying choices more and more into account.
LikeLike
Would it be OK if I cross-posted this article to WriterBeat.com? I’ll be sure to give you complete credit as the author. There is no fee, I’m simply trying to add more content diversity for our community and I liked what you wrote. If “OK” please let me know via email.
Autumn
AutumnCote@WriterBeat.com
LikeLiked by 1 person
Roy, thanks for the well-written article. However, the prisoner’s dilemma seems to be a forced fit in this case.
Who exactly are the prisoners? All the nations who joined the “accord”? Who is ratting on whom? The US seems to be an escapee, so are the rest the prisoners and, without the US, they will cheat on each other?
In the case of the Paris Accord, there is no enforcement. He can confess or not confess, and the outcome is the same. The prisoner has nothing to fear other than some possible unknown punishment in the future. Isn’t more like going to confession to avoid punishment by God (nature in this case)?
Perhaps you mean that leaving the agreement is tantamount to confessing. The US leaves first gaining some benefit to the detriment of the others. It’s still hard for me to get my head around it being a prisoner’s dilemma. I suppose you can say that the rest are punished worse without the cooperation of the US. Is that the point? But there is no punishment under the accord. The punishment comes from God (nature, in this case) at some indeterminate point in the future. So, wouldn’t a better analogy be religion? We don’t know for sure that nature will punish us. We have to take it on fate.
And, you have to consider that the US has already made great strides in reducing CO2 with hydroelectric, nuclear, natural gas, solar, and wind, in its effort to reduce CO2 and will like continue to do so without the accord. Being the number 2 “polluter” and being the number 2 in renewables is not such a bad position. And, it is debatable whether or not the US is in second place when it comes to actual use of “green” energy. It’s a lot like being a community volunteer. Maybe what you do has no real impact, but it–at a minimum–makes you feel like you are doing good. When you do it without someone putting a gun to your head, it can feel less like being a prisoner, and you get a lot more cooperation.
If there is a prisoner analogy, I’d say it is one where the US is the escapee, and the world cop (UN) must capture them and put them back in prison. The rest of the prisoners are doom to pay their penance through higher energy rates. They pay even more because they allowed the US to escape. If they are good, they will achieve an early release (cooler temperatures). If captured, the US will pay a high price.
LikeLike
Thanks Leroy. I have used the game theory of the prisoner’s dilemma in this case to highlight the possible cases here. The US has now decided to play what used to be a cooperative global game in the shape of Paris Accord in an uncooperative manner. Yes there is no punishment clause in the accord and that was the main reason for Nicaragua not to sign the accord. UN cannot punish them. But in this case, the punishment will be in the shape of climate damage, deterioration in our ecological balance. US by deciding to walk out of the agreement can continue with their efforts in reducing the greenhouse gas emissions. But their immediate gain is that they won’t be needed to contribute to the climate change fund for helping the developing countries to switchover to renewable sources of energy. The other countries cannot achieve the desired goal without US support and contributions and hence they have to suffer the increased pollution level, that is their punishment. If both stop negotiating the terms, this will be worst scenario. The best scenario is therefore renegotiations until the Nash Equilibrium is reached.
LikeLike
The Paris “Accord” has never been an agreement on ‘climate change’ but if you actually look at what it physically does is redistribute wealth by putting higher burdens on the countries of Europe and North America. So China and India will have a market advantage, thus wealth will be redistributed favoring the products they produce. The reason the Paris “Accord” is not an agreement about climate is that this skewed balance means coal the worst source of carbon dioxide will increase more then if the accord never existed.
Do you liberal get this. The Paris “Accord” actually increases the pollution you think is causing climate change.
The simple fact is that the climate was changing trillion years ago and will be changing until the sun goes supernova and consumes the earth. And guess what man has only been around in minute portion of the earth’s existence. I would like to see just one of the climate change scientist first define the range of climate change naturally occurred before adding on the green house gases added to the atmosphere by the industrial age. So let me get you started.
Scientists have estimated that the Greenland ice sheet is between 400,000 and 800,000 years old. This means that the island today is unlikely to have been markedly different when Europeans settled there. However, there is evidence that the settled areas were warmer than today, with large birch woodlands providing both timber and fuel. This warmth coincided with the period known as the Medieval Climatic Anomaly, also known as the Medieval Warm Period, During the Medieval Climatic Anomaly, some areas, most notably in the North Atlantic and parts of Europe, were at least as warm as today, if not warmer. However, other areas were colder, and overall evidence suggests that global temperatures during this period were similar to those at the beginning or middle of the 20th century, and colder than today. https://www.skepticalscience.com/greenland-used-to-be-green.htm
Early 1800s, the situation was in diametric contradiction with everybody being worried about a global cooling that seemed to come out of nowhere.
It all peaked in 1816, when in most places of the world there was actually no summer at all ! That year’s chill was blamed by climatologists on the eruption of the Indonesian volcano called Tambora, but why the few years before 1816 were also way colder than usually remained a mystery. However, newly uncovered evidence from the ice of Antarctica and Greenland suggests that another volcanic eruption was probably responsible for it. http://www.zmescience.com/research/studies/taking-a-look-at-the-mini-ice-age-of-1810/
There is a good graph in the article that shows the Medieval Warm Period. Ice core samples I believe is the major source of the data. Carbon dating and measuring the mixture of gases trapped in air bubbles are used to determine the age and atmospheric conditions. Thus a volcano created dust and gases would be trapped in the pole ice.
LikeLike
Re “Do you liberal get this. The Paris “Accord” actually increases the pollution you think is causing climate change.”
No one should be surprised if this is true. We see it in other things the Green left do such as in windmills and solar farms.
LikeLike
Here’s what is going to happen to the Paris Accord since the US dropped out. The US was the tip of the pyramid and will be replaced by China – who will bow out now that they are the one being fleeced. Then Japan, Germany, UK, France will fall like dominos and this farce will be exposed for what it really is – a Pyramid Scam.
LikeLike
Let’s be honest. Aren’t the payments to poorer nations a bribe to get them to go along? Isn’t that why they enthusiastically support the accord, because they receive money? Do you really think they are interested in fighting climate change? It will get straight to the banks in Switzerland. Why does it make sense to invest in poor countries? Would it be better to focus on the worst “polluters”? Since China and the US make of 45%, if you want to get the most bang for the buck, shouldn’t the rest of the world funnel money to them? And when they are 100% “green”, then focus on the next top three and so forth. Focusing on the bottom tier would seem to make little impact.
LikeLike
Did the author ever consider the following?
The entire stated (not actual) premise of the Paris Accord is fictional. NOBODY has established ANY causality between human CO2 and the Earth’s temperature. EVEN IF 25,000,000 studies show a “correlation” between CO2 and Earth temperature, that is insufficient evidence of causality.
LikeLike
Mike H and Roy C., carbon dioxide make up by volume 0.04% and is the major non-water green house gas. Water vapor can go up to 5%. Both are green house gases. The amount of water vapor in the air thus has two orders of magnitude bigger effect, about 95% and 71% our planet surface is water so the sun energy is the major driving force to evaporate water. Thus man has a insignificant effect. “Over the past 250 years, humans have added just one part of CO2 in 10,000 to the atmosphere. One volcanic cough can do this in a day.” And a volcano may continue this level of release for days and to a lesser extent for months. The solid particles put into the air by a volcano have the opposite effect of reflection sun rays back into space. An it takes years for them to fall down to the earth.
We need to understand our real importance to this planet and the solar system is insignificant.
LikeLike
Who is going to make sure the poorer nations actually spend the money they are given on renewable resources ? In many poor countries, money given as aid, winds up in the pockets of the rulers. Why should this time be different ?
Why are China and India exempt for more than 10 years ?
Just because the Paris accord says it is about preventing climate change, does not mean it is. Usually government named programs do not do what their title says. For example the Affordable Care Act, only moves costs around, it does not make health care more affordable. Neither does the Trump plan for that matter.
Politicians like to APPEAR they are doing something, but they almost never SOLVE the problem at hand. They move money around, that is about all they ever do.
LikeLike
Both prisoners should confess that no crime has been committed. AGW is a total fraud. Too many actual climate scientists are coming out. The edited IPCC reports cannot stand up to that.
LikeLike
Hope we get a new President SOON!
LikeLike
hahaha! 😀
LikeLike
https://energyflownews.wordpress.com/2017/06/02/trump-makes-good-on-promise-written-by-chris-stomberg%E2%80%8B/
LikeLiked by 1 person
CO2 models used to justify belief in man made CO2 causing global warming have a history of inaccuracy. Models based on the total amount of radiation earth receives from the sun predict climate much better than any CO2 models do. Please see the following links:
https://phys.org/news/2015-12-earth-tilt-climate.html
http://www.indiana.edu/~geol105/images/gaia_chapter_4/milankovitch.htm
Please notice that these known climate cycles last thousands of years. Even the Medieval Warm Period (950 CE to 1250 CE) and the Little Ice Age (1300 CE to 1850 CE) that followed it both lasted hundreds of years. The global warming enthusiasts base all of their hysteria on the last 50 to 100 years of temperature data. This time frame for observations isn’t long enough to get a statistically viable pattern.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age
Global warming “scientists” use models that are less than 30 years old. The models are computationally very complex. They are also new and largely untested because the computational capacity it takes to solve large systems of difference equations, which is what these models are, has only been available in the last 30 years. The temptation to oversimplify is overwhelming because the time it takes to run the models grows exponentially with the number of variables that are accounted for. Also, the effects of some of the variables aren’t really understood, so the model builders have to guess how they work if they include these variables.
There was no statistically significant global warming in the 23 year period from May, 1993, to February, 2016. During this time, man-made CO2 emissions increased constantly. If the anthropomorphic global warming hypothesis was correct, this outcome would have been impossible. Therefore, the CO2 link to climate change is false based on observed temperatures in recent history.
I think the whole global warming theory is based on extrapolation from a relatively narrow time period of statistical noise. For real science, it’s a gigantic case of hubris. In actuality, AGW is the cover story for a political program of increasing the central government power over every day life by controlling all energy generation and consumption. Due to the “urgency” of the earth’s imminent destruction, no checks and balances can be allowed to continue. The bureaucrats and their “scientific” backers are asking you to trust them with unchecked power so they can “save the planet.” They also want you to buy a bridge, perhaps in Brooklyn, which they call an investment in infrastructure.
The Prisoners’ Dilemma does not apply here at all, because the earth is not on the eve of destruction. There are elements of society trying to remove the checks and balances required to keep us free from an overbearing government. However, we don’t need to believe all of the lies they tell. Remember, even if we liked our doctor and our plan, we didn’t get to keep them.
LikeLike
Thanks Douglas for the details. You have highlighted a good point here on the period of study. I am not an expert to comment on this. But we all agree that there should be conservation of nature as unplanned and unconstrained exploitation is harming our ecosystem.
My article is not on Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) hypothesis rather on the climate negotiations and application of a well-known game theory nicknamed as prisoner’s dilemma. It is probably the most widely used concept in game theory. Its use has transcended Economics, being used in fields such as business management, psychology or biology, to name a few.
The prisoner’s dilemma is not always presented in a game as we have seen in the analogy in the article. Payoffs for each set of strategies vary, depending on each person or group and the case. A game (in strategic or normal form) consists of the following three elements: a set of players, a set of actions (or pure-strategies) available to each player, and a payoff (or utility) function for each player. The payoff functions represent each player’s preferences over action profiles, where an action profile is simply a list of actions, one for each player.
In game theory, betraying your partner, or “defecting” is always the dominant strategy as it always has a slightly higher payoff in a simultaneous game. However, on an overall basis, the best outcome for both players is mutual cooperation.
The iterated prisoner’s dilemma asks whether continual betrayal is inevitable or whether you can devise a strategy that will change your opponent’s behaviour, eliciting cooperation. Should you start off by cooperating? How should you respond if your opponent betrays you?
The paradox that individually rational strategies lead to collectively irrational outcomes seems to challenge a fundamental faith that rational human beings can achieve rational results.
LikeLiked by 1 person
President Trump has done the right thing. My response to climate alarmists (like yourself, Roy Choudhury) is based on correct physics and copious evidence on Earth and throughout the Solar System. The claim that carbon dioxide warms us is the biggest deception in history – a scam causing immeasurable poverty, starvation and death especially due to the reallocation of funds that would otherwise have been spent on humanitarian aid. But even the use of corn for ethanol uses up some of the food supply. There are hundreds of billions of dollars being wasted on pointless research when the whole conjecture is so easily proven wrong with a simple analysis showing that the “greenhouse gas” water vapor cools us. There will be no catastrophe. For those who wish to learn about the 21st century breakthrough in our understanding of the role of so-called “greenhouse gases” in cooling the Earth, see my article and papers. Also see my article “Understanding Natural Climate Cycles.”
Douglas Cotton, (Independent Researcher into atmospheric and sub-terrestrial physics and author of: http://climate-change-theory.com)
LikeLiked by 1 person