For the second time in less than a decade, the United States is expected to retreat from one of the world’s most consequential challenges: limiting the deadly and costly wreckage of climate change.
The election of Donald Trump is not only a setback to the world’s ability to rein in dangerous levels of warming. It also signals to other nations that the new leadership of the richest country in the world, which is also history’s largest emitter of planet-warming greenhouse gases, is dismissive of the economic opportunities of transitioning to cleaner technologies. In addition it’s unlikely to be persuaded to change even as people worldwide are battered by extreme heat, fire and floods.
Mr. Trump, who has called global warming a hoax, is all but certain to pull out of the Paris accord, the global agreement among nations to confront global warming, as he did during his first term as president. He is also likely to reverse a raft of regulations to clean up climate pollution.
In addition to largely isolating the United States on the global climate-diplomacy stage, actions like these would also hand a geopolitical win to the country’s main rival, China, which has spent a decade building up a powerful clean-energy industry and is now increasingly exporting it worldwide.
“The U.S. has barely got on the court. With Trump, it will soon leave the stadium,” said Li Shuo, a China specialist with the Asia Society Policy Institute.
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