The USA rejoins the Paris climate accord

Late last year, Trump wrote an executive order to withdraw the USA from the Paris climate accord. Having long touted it as a bad deal for America (it wasn’t, each country agreed their own targets, they were not forced on the USA), but with little support for the cancellation, his only option was to cancel it by executive order as no legislative body would be willing to do so.

The Paris climate accord is not perfect, it left much of the the difficult negotiation and working out how to put it into action for future governments around the world. However what it did do is get virtually every country in the world to agree to cut their carbon emissions – it created a starting point to work from, on which agreements could be ramped up up overtime, thereby allowing the world to cut emissions enough to hopefully halt global warming at levels which will be manageable.

Just to note, it is widely recognized that the third hardest hit country in the world by global warming is likely to be the USA, and that as such it is fully within Americas own interests to get a grip on their emissions. It is also expected that climate mitigation and carbon reduction industries will be worth trillions in the near future – ignoring this huge market is clearly foolish.

Whether the Biden administration will have good scientifically literate rules on trophy imports and the many other foolish changes made under the Trump administration, will be something we will have to wait and see. This is largely essential if extensive loss of biodiversity, particularly mega fauna, is to be averted (and the huge loss of local financial possibilities with it).

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