Amid the rumpus US President Donald Trump has created with his shock-and-awe, bull-in-a-China-shop diplomacy, his assault on already fraught efforts to contain the climate crisis is possibly the most alarming.
But his withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Agreement again – Joe Biden had the US rejoin the climate pact in 2021 – and his call on US fossil fuel companies to “drill baby, drill” have put the world on watch: the battle to contain a potentially catastrophic global warming just got a whole lot harder.
As the Centre for American Progress puts it, Trump’s decision “disregards science, undermines years of painstaking global cooperation, harms the American economy and people, and sends a dangerous signal that the nation most responsible for the climate crisis is abandoning its moral and practical obligations”.
Not that Trump cares. The US is now one of just four countries sitting aloof from global climate efforts, with Libya, Iran and Yemen. In normal times, the US might call such a peculiar group an axis of climate evil.
But what harm has Trump actually done? In immediate practical terms, he has withdrawn financial support for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the objectives of which the Paris Agreement implements.