Trump To Withdraw From Paris Climate Agreement

President Donald Trump will withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement for the second time, delivering a blow to the effort to keep global temperatures from rising to dangerous levels.

The president announced plans to exit the nearly 200-nation pact on Monday in a White House press release outlining a forthcoming executive order. The process will take a full year from the date the Trump administration formally notifies the United Nations climate body. While the U.S. can still participate in annual climate negotiations, it will do so with less influence than before.

The move will take the world’s largest economy and the biggest historical contributor to climate change out of the global pact that aims to mitigate rising temperatures and the problems they are causing around the world, including more devastating hurricanes, wildfires and other disasters and displacement of people from the hardest-hit areas. The U.S. withdrawal further imperils nations’ already slim hopes of preventing 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming since the Industrial Revolution began.

Analyses have shown the Paris agreement sharply reduced projected levels of warming. Its backers contend those forecasts prove the deal’s goal-setting and peer pressure yields a positive effect, even if nations consistently fall short of their own targets.

The planned U.S. withdrawal raises questions about how to maintain international climate progress during Trump’s second term. Trump has vowed to repeal much of the climate spending and environmental actions taken by former President Joe Biden with an eye toward meeting the Paris agreement goals. Trying to meet those goals will be an even more daunting task with Trump aiming to turbocharge fossil fuels, the primary driver of climate change.

The World Meteorological Organization said earlier this month that global temperatures already have hit 1.3 C above pre-industrial levels.Last year was the second-consecutive record-setting hot year, and the last 10 years are the hottest on record.