Welcome to the Climate Fwd: newsletter. The New York Times climate team emails readers once a week with stories and insights about climate change. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.

By

It’s a busy week on the climate front for the Trump administration. In Washington, the Environmental Protection Agency and Interior Department are teeing up more rollbacks of Obama-era regulations. In Katowice, Poland, where diplomats are gathered for another round of United Nations climate change negotiations, White House officials are promoting fossil fuels.

My colleague Brad Plumer, who is in Katowice, attended the Trump team’s event, which drew jeers from environmental activists but attracted some powerful potential allies among major coal and oil producers like Saudi Arabia and Australia. Diplomats are starting to ask: Is the United States now actively trying to undermine the Paris Agreement, from which it intends to withdraw?

The realignment is happening against a backdrop of protests in France that President Trump has blamed on the Paris Agreement. Alissa J. Rubin and Somini Sengupta unpacked how the design of France’s carbon tax, and not the drive to reduce planet-warming emissions itself, led to political backlash. You should also check out Somini’s other piece on how the growing rift between the United States and China could undermine global efforts to curb climate change.

But any way you slice the emissions picture, no major country is really on track to meet its Paris Agreement goals, Brad and Nadja Popovich reported.