The U.S. will leave the Paris climate accord on Nov. 4th – but voters will decide for how long.
Under Trump, the USA will be the only country to drop out of the international agreement to cut pollution linked to climate change. But if Joe Biden wins, he has pledged to rejoin the accord.
The USA national election on Tuesday has been called the most pivotal in decades, but on Wednesday, the United States is set to become the only nation to officially withdraw from an international pact aimed at slowing climate change. The exit of the world’s largest economy — and the second biggest emitter of greenhouse gases after China — comes three years to the day after President Trump began the long legal process of withdrawing the US from the 2015 Paris climate accord.
The differences could hardly be more stark, the stakes hardly higher. Sea level rise is already threatening to flood low lying countries like Bangladesh, and elsewhere ocean acidification and swelling seas are driving coral reefs toward extinction and endangering fishing.
In the year before the Paris climate agreement, President Obama raised climate change in virtually every meeting with a foreign leader. “No nation, large or small, wealthy or poor, is immune,” he said in one U.N. speech. Trump, by contrast, has repeatedly questioned the science around climate change and looked upon international cooperation as both suspect and expensive.
Read further in the Washington Post of 29th October.
