Trump on Monday took the first step to formally withdraw from the Paris agreement. U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo announced the move in a tweet Monday, the first day that they could begin the one-year withdrawal process. The primary goal of the Paris accord was to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists warned that "President Trump's decision to walk away from the Paris agreement is irresponsible and shortsighted. All too many people are already experiencing the costly and harmful impacts of climate change in the form of rising seas, more intense hurricanes and wildfires, and record-breaking temperatures."
"The total retreat by President Trump and his administration in the global fight against climate change is the definition of betrayal," declared Environmental Working Group president Ken Cook. "The U.S. and the world are rapidly running out of time to stave off the worst impacts of climate disruption, while the president is actively working to speed up our collision with the biggest existential threat facing every American."
Jean Su, energy director with the Center for Biological Diversity's (CBD) Climate Law Institute, said in a statement that "Trump can run from the Paris agreement, but he can't hide from the climate crisis. America is the number one historical contributor to the climate emergency wreaking havoc in burning California, the flooded Southeast, and the rest of the world," Su added. "The next president must repay this extraordinary climate debt by rapidly moving America to 100 percent clean energy and financing the decarbonization of the Global South."
350.org North America director, Tamara Toles O'Laughlin, said that "Trump is torching our future so fossil fuel billionaires can pull a profit while the rest of us pay the price."
Katie Eder, the 19-year-old executive director of Future Coalition, explained, "Trump has made it clear that he is going to continue to put the wants of large corporations and fossil fuel executives above the lives and futures of our generation," Eder said
It is the tragedy that many work and hope for the solution to the immediate problem of the climate crises and it is the strength of capitalism that can create the political conditions for workers to organise against a symptom of the environment emergency rather than unite for the complete overthrow of the cause. In fact, organisations like XR, insofar as they draw the attention of the workers from the real cause of the global warming problem lends credibility to the capitalist fiction that problems we face are soluble within capitalism, are abetting the political administrators of capitalism in concealing from the people the real nature of capitalist exploitation. XR not because it wanted to, but because it failed to understand the real nature of the problem, has in effect become a further obstacle on the road to a solving the crises they protest about. Few of XR’sproposals go anywhere near solving the the current planetary crises. The constraints imposed by capitalism requires fundamental changes in the structure of production. The ecological sustainable solutions requires abandoning the capitalist mode of production which is based upon the exploitation of working people and of nature.
The Socialist Party has failed to convince the workers of the need for socialism. We cannot boast of our record; we are pitifully few and our energies and efforts are dissipated mainly in endeavouring to counteract the activities of those bodies that waylay people into the side-track struggle for reforms. We have endeavoured to bring the socialist message into the environmental campaigns. To date that message has been rejected.
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