by Justin Gillis and Nadja Popovich
“In cumulative terms, (click here) we certainly own this problem more than anybody else does,” said David G. Victor, a longtime scholar of climate politics at the University of California, San Diego. Many argue that this obligates the United States to take ambitious action to slow global warming.
But on Thursday, President Trump announced the United States would withdraw from a 195-nation agreement on climate change reached in Paris in 2015.
The decision to walk away from the accord is a momentous setback, in practical and political terms, for the effort to address climate change.
An American exit could prompt other countries to withdraw from the pact or rethink their emissions pledges, making it much harder to achieve the agreement’s already difficult goal of limiting global warming to a manageable level....
