United States Should Be Leading on Climate Change, Not Retreating

"While everyone is glued to cable networks and social media awaiting updates on the election results, we should not lose focus on the calamity of global climate change,” said EESI Executive Director Daniel Bresette. “The United States formally withdrew from the Paris Agreement today, the only nation—out of 196—to do so. Climate change is real and we are already feeling the effects of it across the United States. The longer we wait to get serious about climate change, the harder, more disruptive, and costlier it will be to curb temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. States and cities are doing their best to keep up, but we need the federal government to be part of the effort. We should be leading, but instead we are retreating.”

The Paris Agreement calls on the world's nations to keep global warming significantly below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and to strive to limit the increase to 1.5 °C (2.7 °F). This would primarily be achieved by transitioning to cleaner energy sources and by promoting energy efficiency. With almost universal support from the world's nations, the Paris Agreement entered into force in record time in November 2016. In 2017, President Donald Trump announced the United States would withdraw from the Agreement, and that withdrawal became effective on November 4, 2020, the day after the U.S. presidential election. Other major powers—including China, the European Union, Britain, Japan, and South Korea—have reaffirmed their commitments to the Paris Agreement and have set ambitious goals to become carbon neutral by 2050 (or 2060 in China’s case).