Marston: On climate change, businesses know better than Trump

President Donald Trump tried to justify his unilateral decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate deal last week by falsely claiming he was acting on behalf of the people of Pittsburgh.

The city's mayor - the person directly elected by its residents - quickly denounced the Trump's "misguided decision" on the president's favorite medium, Twitter. "I can assure you that we will follow the guidelines of the Paris Agreement for our people, our economy & future," Mayor Bill Peduto wrote.

Within hours, nearly 200 mayors, including Houston's Sylvester Turner, had signed a statement promising to continue the fight against climate change in spite of Trump.

The mayors understand that Trump's reckless decision to abandon the international agreement leaves American cities, states and businesses to fill the void. It is up to them to reduce climate-altering pollution and promote energy efficiency in the absence of the federal government's leadership.

Fortunately, even before last week, Houston was taking big steps to fight global warming. The city, for example, is the nation's largest municipal buyer of renewable energy. By purchasing Texas wind and solar power, it has reduced its heat-trapping pollution by 35 percent over the past decade while reducing its electric bill. The city's goal is to reduce emissions 80 percent from 2007 levels by 2050.

Turner reaffirmed this commitment after Trump bailed on the global pact because he understands Houston is in the cross-hairs of climate change. The low-lying city had more than $45 million in damages from a single storm-driven flooding event in May 2016. Studies have shown that global warming made events like this more frequent.

Forecasts also show that the Texas coast may see more than 2 feet in sea-level rise by the 2050s because of a warming planet and melting ice caps. If the predictions hold, large areas of Galveston and Houston, including oil refineries and chemical plants along the Ship Channel, will be underwater.

Houston's stubborn smog problem is likely to grow worse because of climate change, too. That is because ozone, or smog, forms more quickly at higher temperatures.

For Texas as a whole, a warming climate means fewer crops, increasingly stressed water supplies and bigger, longer, hotter wildfires, among other impacts.

Remarkably, Trump and his advisers ignore this reality.

They instead hold onto a paranoid notion that the climate agreement, which was signed by 195 countries vowing to reduce their own emissions, threatened American jobs.

In an interview following the president's Paris retreat, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said other countries wanted the accord only to undermine the U.S. economy.

"They wanted to hurt us economically, to put us at a disadvantage to competing with them," he told radio host Hugh Hewitt.

The truth is the Trump administration's abrupt withdrawal isolates the United States diplomatically and economically. It drops us into the losers' bracket with Syria and Nicaragua, the only two nations that refused to sign the climate pact. (Even then, Nicaragua wanted a stronger agreement.)

China and Europe, meanwhile, are moving to assume the leadership role that Trump surrendered on clean energy. Unlike the president, they can see the economic possibilities, a global clean energy market worth roughly $1 trillion a year.

That is why so many CEOs, including companies with deep ties to Houston, were urging Trump to stay put. ExxonMobil, for one, advised Trump to remain in the agreement. BP, Dow Chemical and Shell made similar statements.

"Our support for the #ParisAgreement is well known," Shell wrote on Twitter last week, adding that the company would "continue to do our part providing more & cleaner energy."

Shell's statement is encouraging because everyone, especially corporations, will need to do more in the absence of Trump. More businesses should follow the lead of Walmart and Google by pledging to use only renewable energy. Mayors can do the same, running their cities on wind and solar, like Pittsburgh's Peduto vowed to do after the president's unwelcomed shout-out. Cities also can reduce pollution from their transportation systems. All of us can drive cars with greater fuel efficiency and retrofit our buildings to waste less energy while saving money on gas and electric bills.

Although Trump has forfeited moral authority by leaving the world effort to combat climate change, cities, states and companies can continue to reduce our carbon pollution. Like with Pittsburgh, fighting carbon pollution is good for Houston's people, economy and future.

Marston is vice president of clean energy at Environmental Defense Fund. He is based in Austin.