CHEERS! POLITICO: Trump’s exit from the UN climate deal ‘signals the beginning of an aggressive agenda to undo U.S. climate policy’

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/01/20/trumps-exit-climate-deal-means-00199406

By Sara SchonhardtZack Colman and Karl Mathiesen

President Donald Trump declared Monday that he will withdraw once again from the 2015 Paris climate agreement — instantly isolating the U.S. from the global campaign to stem catastrophic warming.

This time, Trump’s repudiation of the worldwide climate effort could bite deeper by taking effect more quickly and at a time when the new president has more far-right allies overseas and at home.

The announcement collides with a rise in climate havoc around the world, including the devastating Los Angeles wildfires and revelations that last year was the hottest ever recorded. It marks the launch of an aggressive agenda to roll back U.S. climate policy, driven by an emboldened president who invites confrontation over the scientific underpinnings of climate change.

The long-promised exit, outlined in a White House press release less than 30 minutes after Trump took his oath of office, will jettison the United States’ Biden-era promise to cut climate pollution by up to 66 percent within a decade. It also calls into question a host of other U.S. commitments, such as providing billions of dollars in support to poorer nations suffering from unprecedented heat waves, floods and rising seas.

Trump’s action also raises the odds that, without U.S. leadership, the world will fall even further behind the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting the Earth’s warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a threshold that could accelerate the pace of climate damage. The U.S. is the second-biggest source after China of the carbon pollution driving up global temperatures.

The U.S. had already been slipping behind its 2030 climate targets, despite efforts that included hundreds of billions of dollars in clean-energy spending by former President Joe Biden. Trump accompanied his new Paris pullout with a barrage of executive orders aimed at squelching Biden’s handiwork, including by declaring a national energy emergency that Trump said would unlock what he called America’s “liquid gold.”

“We will drill, baby, drill,” Trump said in his inauguration address. “We have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have, the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth, and we are going to use it.”

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