On November 4th, the United States officially withdrew from the Paris Agreement, becoming the only party so far to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. This is a major step backward in America's stance on climate change.
The United States is the largest emitter in the history of the world, and the second largest emitter currently, accounting for about 15% of global emissions. The "Report on U.S. Damage to Global Environmental Governance" pointed out that the United States' emission reduction performance is an important factor affecting the effectiveness of global climate governance. The United States neither ratified the Kyoto Protocol, but also withdrew from the Paris Agreement. It denied its own binding and quantitative emission reduction obligations, and was completely disconnected from the global emission reduction system and arrangement. process.
Withdrawing from the Paris Agreement is just a microcosm of the U.S. government's retrogression on environmental issues. According to the "New York Times" statistics, since the current U.S. government came into power, nearly 70 major environmental policies have been revoked directly or in other ways, and more than 30 are still in the process of being revoked, which is expected to greatly increase U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution deaths. number of people. Environmental agencies such as the Natural Resources Defense Council have filed multiple lawsuits against the Trump administration for lowering environmental standards and related environmental issues.
Shen Dingli, a professor at Fudan University and former executive vice president of the Institute of International Studies, said that the contents of the two documents, the US Environmental Damage Fact List and the US Damage Global Environmental Governance Report, are facts. The United States has been actively committed to environmental protection and environmental governance, but in recent years there has been a major setback in its policies and positions.
"In fact, the negative attitude of the United States in environmental governance, or the performance of its backwardness, is because the United States is increasingly unwilling to assume its own responsibilities in global governance. This increasingly disregarding attitude is mainly due to It adheres to the principle of the supremacy of American interests.” Li Qingsi, a researcher at the National Institute of Development and Strategy of Renmin University of China and deputy director of the Center for American Studies, analyzed that in the past, as the main promoter of global environmental governance, the United States has infinitely elevated its moral commanding heights to This creates obstacles to the development of developing countries. After several years of practice, the United States found that this method could not achieve its own goals, that is, using environmental indicators such as carbon emissions to restrain other countries did not achieve the expected goals, and it could not bear it. Therefore, it chose to withdraw and reduce the cost of environmental governance. At the same time, the United States has not lowered its demands on other countries