President Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement on Climate change overturns a pact of cooperation to combat global warming that was unprecedented. So says, Carol Franco, of Virginia Tech’s College of Natural Resources. She was there when the Paris agreement was signed in 2015. She says, unlike the Kyoto Agreement before it, Paris marked the first time not only developing countries but developed nations also, agreed on a path they would take together.
“There was a lot of bargaining in that agreement and everybody got what they could live with. There was no red line that the United States committed to. Basically all countries were able to come out with an agreement that they felt was fair enough for everyone.”
Other countries will have to pick up the slack left by the loss of the U.S.’s considerable resources.
As part of the Paris Agreement, all the participating countries formally agreed to raise one hundred billion dollars for the collective effort by 2020. As of last month, there was ten-billion in the Green Climate Fund.