For anyone who’s been following the fate of the United States’ involvement in the Paris agreement, the main question surrounding it recently has been pretty clear: Will he or won’t he? Conflicting reports over the weekend — sparked by a vague Wall Street Journal story on Saturday — alleged that the Trump administration was reconsidering its June decision to withdraw from the landmark climate deal. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster denied it, only to be upstaged Sunday morning by Secretary of State and former Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, whose department would theoretically oversee either a renegotiation or a withdrawal. On this week’s Face the Nation, Tillerson said that President Donald Trump was “open to finding those conditions where we can remain engaged with others on what we all agree is still a challenging issue.” In what’s being taken as a for-now final word on the matter, chief economic adviser Gary Cohn emphasized Monday that the U.S. will leave the agreement “unless we can re-enter on terms that are more favorable to our country,” doubling down on the line the administration has held since its initial withdrawal announcement. This weekend’s mixed signals kept reporters busy. Confusion around the agreement may even have put climate change in the news more than the string of hurricanes that have battered the Caribbean and southern United States in recent weeks, the strengths of which can be linked to rising temperatures and sea levels. Materially, though, the Paris agreement’s future in the U.S. may be one of the least important aspects of Trump’s climate policy. It may not even have that big of an impact on the agreement itself. As conflicting messages shoot back and forth, other members of the administration are quietly unraveling a slew of policies, precedents, and regulations in ways that could make it much more difficult to plan for a low-carbon future after they’re gone. Considering the U.S. accounts for around one-fifth of global emissions, these moves could also make it harder to curb warming worldwide. Even if Trump is eager to bail on Paris as soon as possible, the United States won’t technically be able to make an official exit until November 2020, the tail end of Trump’s first — and, with any hope, last — term. What he can do is start the process to make that happen, which will be routed largely through a State Department that might still lack the proper staffing to carry out the job. Effectively, nothing has changed; since the Rose Garden announcement about the decision to bail on the agreement earlier this summer, the White House’s line has always been that it would stay in if it could somehow negotiate a better deal. Multiple countries have also said that the underlying language of the deal won’t change no matter what the White House does.

President Donald Trump arrives to speak about the U.S. role in the Paris climate accord on June 1, 2017, in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington. Photo: Andrew Harnik/AP

Most of the document’s emissions reduction plans, meanwhile, are tied to each country’s nationally determined contribution brought to the table in France in 2015. The central feature of the U.S. commitment that year was the Clean Power Plan, aimed at capping emissions from power production. Scott Pruitt has spent his tenure so far as Environmental Protection Agency administrator making every attempt to dismantle it from within; his agency is currently in the process of reviewing the plan and proposing its replacement, and on a longer term mission to cripple its own authority. Put simply, whether Trump stays in the agreement means little if the chief means of compliance — the Clean Power Plan — is gutted. On the other hand, if states and companies move in the direction the plan intended even without it in force, Trump’s gutting loses power. After the withdrawal, many have even stated that they intend to strengthen their carbon-cutting plans in response. All of that has more bearing on the atmosphere than Trump’s rhetoric around Paris. Pruitt has other ways of pushing his agenda, too. As Rebecca Leber chronicled for Mother Jones, he spent the days after hurricanes Harvey and Irma fending off allegations from the Senate that his EPA has grown increasingly nontransparent, insulting German Chancellor Angela Merkel and chiding anyone who dared to mention climate change in relation to the two storms. To top it all off, on September 12, he stalled an Obama-era regulation that kept power plants from releasing toxic metals into wastewater. Research funding proposals must now pass through a public relations head, who reportedly advised staffers to excise the “double C-word” from any funding requests. Inspired partially by New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, he’s also expressed interest in hosting a “red team, blue team” debate on the existence and severity of man-made global warming — an event that could help prime the pump for scaling back the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon. He’s not alone, either. Expanding fossil fuel production — and minimizing regulations on it — has been a priority for the administration more generally since its first days, when Trump brought both the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines back from the dead. Tillerson is rumored to be in the process of nixing the U.S. climate change envoy to the United Nations. Ryan Zinke this weekend said his Department of the Interior would look to shrink federally protected natural monuments and will soon embark on the first steps toward drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The list goes on.

Why, then, are crossed wires around the agreement one of the only times that network news anchors bother to mention rising temperatures?