If President Donald Trump merely pulls the United States out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, it will be like cutting the head off a dandelion. It will look good for a while until equally bad agreements quickly grow back when a Democrat occupies the White House again. Trump needs to dig up the roots of Paris—the 1992 U.N. climate treaty—if he is to keep his campaign promise to “stop all payments of the United States tax dollars to UN global warming programs.”
Trump can, and should, get the US out of the Paris Agreement, of course. Besides the scientifically unfounded objective of “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels,” as if we had a global thermostat, the agreement lets so-called developing countries largely off the hook despite the fact that non-OECD countries are now the greatest source of energy related emissions. Consider the agreement’s emission targets for the US versus China, currently the world’s largest emitter, for example:
