Trump has ditched the world in favor of Big Oil (the guardian)

Jill Abramson / The Guardian

Craven, cynical and corrupt: an alliteration that sums up Donald Trump?s decision to pull the US out of the Paris accord on climate change.

He rebuffed the entreaties of everyone from Elon Musk to the pope. He ignored scientific evidence that already shows catastrophic beach erosion, cracking Arctic ice and flooding cities. Instead, he cast in with his climate change-denying EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, and the barons of the world?s dirtiest industries, coal and fossil fuels.

It was a craven act because the US over time is the biggest contributor to the carbon dioxide that is poisoning the atmosphere and sizzling the planet. Given our culpability in creating an urgent worldwide environmental crisis, it was a moral duty to keep our commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit global warming to 2C (3.6F). To walk away is supremely selfish.

“In cumulative terms, we certainly own this problem more than anybody else does,” David G. Victor, a longtime scholar of climate politics at the University of California at San Diego told the New York Times. “Many argue that this obligates the United States to take ambitious action to slow global warming.”

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