See Jeff Goodell Explain How U.S. Is Subverting Efforts to Curb Climate Change
Contributing editor Jeff Goodell recaps the 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP) in Katowice, Poland and explains how the Trump administration subverted efforts to curb climate change efforts at the conference in this exclusive Rolling Stone video.
“Previous COPs have been chaotic and politically charged, but this is the first COP in which America not only abandoned its leadership role, but actively worked to subvert the political power of the agreement,” Goodell said before mapping out how then-President Barack Obama played an active role during the Paris COP in 2015.
“This year, everybody knew America was out of the game. Shortly after taking office, President Trump announced his intention to pull out of the Paris accord, which for procedural reasons, can’t happen until 2020. In the weeks prior to the meeting in Poland, President Trump suggested in a tweet, once again, that climate change is a hoax.”
COP brings together 197 nations from around the world to deal with the climate change crisis. However, this year the United States sent a small, Trump-less delegation to the conference that sided with Russia and Saudi Arabia on important matters pertaining to fossil fuels.
“When the talks ended, there were no breakthroughs in Katowice, and few signs that the nations of the world were poised to take dramatic action to cut carbon pollution in the near future,” Goodell explained. “But neither did the talks collapse into a bureaucratic black hole or spin out of control.”
As Goodell notes, it comes down to the citizens of Earth and not the nations’ leadership to take action on climate change.
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