President Donald Trump has reportedly made up his mind to withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement, setting him at odds with 194 other nations but fulfilling a rapturously-received campaign promise.

The Paris Agreement commits almost 200 countries to ensure that the average global temperature does not rise by more than 2C above pre-industrial levels, by cutting down on high-carbon energy and fuels.

Signed in 2015 by Barack Obama, he hailed it as a “turning point” in the fight against climate change which would “open the floodgates for low-carbon innovation at a scale we haven’t seen before”.

But Mr Trump, who in 2012 described climate change as a hoax invented by the Chinese, was elected to take America – the world’s second-largest polluter, after China - out of the agreement. Indeed, much of policy can be seen through the prism of undoing everything that Mr Obama prized – healthcare, the Iran deal and now the climate change agreement.

