5 things to know about the Paris climate agreement
The United States will join Iran, Libya, and Yemen as the only UN countries that are not part of the agreement.
The 2015 Paris climate agreement is not the boogeyman that punishes the United States that critics such as President Donald Trump claim. But it hasn’t quite kept the world from overheating either.
The Paris agreement is a mostly voluntary climate pact originally written in ways that would both try to reduce warming and withstand the changing political winds in the United States.
In his first hours in office, Trump started the year-long process to withdraw from the pact. It’s the second time he’s done it—then-President Joe Biden had the U.S. rejoin on his second day in office.
Once the withdrawal takes effect next year the United States joins Iran, Libya, and Yemen as the only United Nations countries that are not part of the agreement.
The U.S. withdrawal, while expected, triggered heavy reactions from around the world. That’s because the United States is historically responsible for the largest share of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, has been a leader in international climate negotiations and is the world’s largest producer of the fossil fuels that cause the problem in the first place.
When the agreement was signed December 12, 2014, then-President Barack Obama called it “the best chance to save the one planet we have.”