Is the Paris Climate Agreement easier on China and India than on the US?

President Joe Biden has been systematically undoing former President Donald Trump’s policies on climate change. Case in point — Trump took the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement. On Biden’s first day, he signed paperwork to bring the United States back in.

Under the Paris agreement, about 200 nations promised to set goals to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. Each nation decides for itself what its goal will be. The hope is that cumulatively, those reductions would limit global temperature increases to no more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, criticized Biden’s move.

"We have to stop joining deals that are bad for America," Scott said in a statement to the press. "President Biden is throwing the U.S. back into the Paris Agreement just to appease his liberal friends. This deal does nothing to hold real polluters, like Communist China and India, accountable."

There’s debate over how well the agreement’s overall approach will meet the challenge of climate change. Here, we focus on Scott’s claim that the agreement puts the U.S. at a disadvantage because it does nothing to hold "real" polluters like China and India accountable.

Under the agreement, each country submits a set of greenhouse gas reduction targets called a Nationally Determined Contribution. Countries have been sending these to the United Nations since they launched the agreement in 2015, with new or updated goals due in 2020, and every five years after that.

For example, in its 2016 plan, China said that by 2030, it would lower carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by 60% to 65% compared with 2005 releases. So, although its emissions would rise as its economy grew, they wouldn’t rise as much as they would have if everything worked the way it did in 2005. China said it would aim for carbon dioxide emissions to peak in about 2030.

India set a more modest goal of cutting emissions by 33% to 35% per unit of GDP by 2030. Both China and India had additional goals on their list.

Scott said the agreement has no way to hold nations accountable if they stray from meeting their goals.

Benjamin Zycher, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a market-oriented think tank, said Scott has a point.

"The Nationally Determined Contributions are strictly voluntary," Zycher said. "There is no enforcement mechanism."