The Paris agreement is a mostly voluntary climate pact originally written to both try to reduce warming and withstand the changing political winds in the U.S.

Although hardly a surprise, President Trump’s executive decision to exit the international effort to halt global heating for a second time has been met with dismay on this side of the Atlantic. View o

When Trump announced the U.S. withdrawal from the climate agreement in 2017, the move reverberated around the globe. Nearly 200 nations had committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions under the pact when it was created in 2015, and they had set ambitious targets to keep global temperature rise well below 2°C, and ideally below 1.5°C.