Paris withdrawal: Trump officially turns his back on climate crisis and our own children Leaving the Paris climate agreement isn’t about putting America first. It's about putting fossil fuel profits first and putting the rest of us at risk.

Mitch Bernard | Opinion contributor

Show Caption Hide Caption Trump's energy plan: Coal v. renewable energy, explained Earlier this year, America surpassed Russia and China as producers of oil and natural gas and supplied more clean energy than coal. Here's how.

With a letter to the United Nations, President Donald Trump has formally opened the year-long process of withdrawing the United States from the landmark 2015 Paris climate agreement.

This is a grave and reckless mistake. We’ll all pay the price — no one more than our children.

The Paris climate agreement was a triumph of American leadership. In taking commonsense measures to clean up our cars, trucks and dirty power plants, President Barack Obama put teeth in his pledge to cut climate-wrecking greenhouse gas emissions in this country at least 26% below 2005 levels by 2025.

That by itself was important. The United States is the second largest producer of the carbon pollution and other greenhouse gases that are driving the world to the brink of climate disaster.

US climate leadership is vital

U.S. climate action, though, also gave this country the credibility to urge China, India and other major climate polluters to commit to limiting or reducing carbon emissions. The Paris agreement gathers 187 countries around concrete plans to do just that.

The Paris Agreement didn’t solve the climate crisis. However, it did establish a floor to build upon going forward, with its call for countries to regroup every five years to assess the progress they’re making and to strengthen their efforts.

That’s essential. To avert climate catastrophe, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tells us, the world must cut greenhouse gas emissions 45% from 2010 levels by 2030. By 2050, it must eliminate the emissions, or counter any that remain by strengthening the capacity for wetlands, forests and agriculture to take carbon from the air and lock it away into healthy soils.

We won’t hit those targets without a global effort. It won’t happen without U.S. leadership. It won’t happen as long as the world’s second largest climate polluter is backsliding on the climate pledge it has made to the rest of the world.

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Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax,” likes to boast that, in any event, the United States is already cutting its carbon footprint. The truth is, we were cutting it before he took office and, since then, have treaded water or lost ground.

After cutting carbon pollution by about 14% since 2005, U.S. carbon emissions rose 3.1% in 2018, as Trump sought to ease limits on such pollution from the very cars, trucks and power plants Obama had worked to clean up.

Trump is putting fossil fuels first

At the same time, Trump is trying to lock future generations into perpetual dependence on fossil fuels.

He has curbed or weakened needed protections against the damage coal mining does to rivers and streams. He has done the same to standards that limited the amount of methane — another powerful climate-wrecking pollutant — oil and gas operations can dump into the atmosphere. And he has moved to expose special public places like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante monuments, and U.S. ocean waters in the Arctic, Pacific, Atlantic and eastern Gulf of Mexico to the ongoing harm and catastrophic risks of fossil fuel production.

This isn’t about putting America first. It’s about putting fossil fuel profits first — and putting the rest of us at risk.

Any international agreement can be improved. At its heart though, the Paris climate accord is essential. It’s about forging a coalition of conscience that gathers the world around a common goal to protect ourselves and our children from climate catastrophe.

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It sends a message to the world that, together, we can find global solutions to this global threat and the rising costs and mounting dangers it’s already imposing. It sends a message to markets that the future belongs to those who invest in the clean energy sources of tomorrow. And it sends a message to our children that we will not abandon them to a world of endlessly rising seas, vanishing species, widening deserts and raging wildfires, storms and floods.

In pulling us out of the Paris Agreement, Trump is sending a message, too. He’s turning his back on the central environmental crisis of our time, breaking our promise to the rest of the world — and leaving our kids to pay the price.

Mitch Bernard is chief counsel and interim president of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Follow him on Twitter: @mitchNRDC