True to his word, Donald Trump has ordered the US out of the Paris Agreement on climate change.
Are efforts to combat climate change doomed?
Well, you can argue whether it’s actually going to happen. Mr Trump promised to pull out last time he was president.
But his term in office ended before all the red tape binding the US to the UN Paris pact was unravelled. This time his team will have more experience.
Will it actually make much difference? The UN climate process rumbled slowly on for four years without any US recognition or involvement during the last Trump reign.
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Some momentum was lost, but the process didn’t collapse and no other nation followed suit.
After the fossil-fuelled interregnum, America came back arguably greener than before. This time, it’s not so clear – already Argentina, under Trump-supporting Javier Milei, has said it might also quit the agreement.
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Don’t forget though, that a global transition away from fossil fuels is underway despite all this.
Ignore the “Drill baby, drill!” and “energy emergency” rhetoric of the inauguration speech.
A fact rarely acknowledged, certainly by the MAGA movement, is that the US is now the world’s largest producer of oil and gas with production hitting an all-time high under Joe Biden.
Changes in fossil fuel use in the US are driven by efficiency improvements that favour consumers. The decline in fossil fuels for electricity production is largely due to solar and wind being cheaper than oil, coal, and gas.
The real significance is what it means politically.
The move signals that the leader of the world’s largest economy, and by extension the majority of Americans who voted for him, believe their nation bears no moral obligation to the rest of the world for its historic carbon emissions – which are twice that of China’s and unlikely to ever be surpassed by any other country.
It broadcasts a belief that economic prosperity can only be secured by sticking to fossil-fuelled technologies of the 19th and 20th Centuries.
The move also comes despite little evidence that poorer Americans have suffered as a result of “green” policies introduced by previous administrations.
It suggests that, in Mr Trump’s view, the dangers and costs associated with increased carbon emissions are for future generations to bear.
It also says that the impacts of climate change being felt now, like the wildfires that gutted parts of Los Angeles and the floods that killed hundreds of Americans following Hurricane Helene, are either not his responsibility, or ones he is happy to ignore.
