1 gen 2017 anni - United States withdraws from Paris CLimate Agreement

Descrizione:

In 2015, Obama directed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to adopt the Clean Power Plan to combat greenhouse gases. Enforcement of this plan was subsequently blocked by a Supreme Court stay, and its guidelines subsequently weakened by Obama’s successor, Donald Trump. The fight over the Clean Power Plan illustrated the political quagmire around a looming global issue. A scientific consensus has existed for decades that the production of energy through the burning of carbon-based substances (especially petroleum and coal) increases the presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, warming the earth. Increasing temperatures are already producing dramatically new weather patterns and melting polar ice. Climate change threatens agricultural production, plant and animal life, and the viability of cities and regions at or near the current sea level. How to halt, or at least mitigate, climate change has become one of the most pressing public policy issues of the twenty-first century.


rriving at the scientific consensus on climate change has proven easier than developing government policies to address it. This is especially true in the United States, where oil company lobbyists, defenders of free-market capitalism, and conservatives who deny global warming altogether have been instrumental in blocking action. The United States is not a signatory to the major international treaty — the so-called Kyoto Protocol — designed to reduce carbon emissions, and in 2017 newly elected President Trump withdrew from the one major international climate accord — known as the Paris Climate Agreement — that the United States had signed. Legislative proposals have not fared better. Cap-and-trade legislation, so named because it places a cap on individual polluters’ emissions but allows those companies to trade for more emission allowances from low polluters, has stalled in Congress. Another proposal, a tax on carbon emissions, has gained little political support. Regardless of political resistance, climate change will rank among the critical issues of the twenty-first century for the United States and the rest of the planet.

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