America and climate change: The flaws in Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris accord

Main image:  AFTER announcing on June 1st that America will abandon the Paris climate agreement, Donald Trump can at least claim to have honoured a campaign promise. Then again, as he also pledged to reinstate torture, eliminate the national debt in eight years and hail Iran’s supreme leader with “Hey baby!”, that isn’t saying much. And the president’s decision to withdraw from the accord is similarly unconscionable and fatuous. A repudiation of his predecessor’s main climate policy, it was opposed by most of Mr Trump’s advisers, most large American firms and two-thirds of Americans. Mr Trump has dealt a severe blow to America’s interests and standing.More hot air than a flue-gas stackThe Republicans who had been arguing to leave Paris, including Scott Pruitt, who disputes that people cause climate change and heads Mr Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency, consider this as merely consistent with George W. Bush’s decision to exit the Kyoto protocol in 2001. Yet Mr Bush, though misguided, at least had an economic argument. Kyoto imposed binding greenhouse-gas emissions cuts on rich countries but not on fast-growing developing ones, such as China, which overtook America to become the world’s biggest polluter only six years later. The Paris accord is different. All its signatories—which is to say, ...

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