Global Warming, Paris and a Stark Trump-Biden Divide

Even with the involvement of the U.S., the biggest carbon producer in history, the global response to climate change faced an uphill battle. And that was before President Donald Trump began a lengthy process to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement on global warming. The threat of climate change, and value of the Paris accord, present one of the starkest contrasts between Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, his Democratic challenger in the Nov. 3 election.

The 2015 accord among almost 200 countries brought together the developed and developing worlds to pledge limits on the fossil-fuel pollution that causes climate change. Those pledges are voluntary and non-binding. The goal is to hold the rise in temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius (compared with preindustrial levels), and preferably to 1.5 degree, at the end of this century, to avoid the rising seas and superstorms that climate models predict.