The Paris agreement is complex and works in a slow bureaucratic manner. It’s a mostly voluntary climate pact originally written in ways that would both try to reduce a worsening climate change problem and withstand the changing political winds in the United States.

With the US out of the tent, the rest of the world can get on with climate action without Trump’s corrosive influence.

Trump signed an executive order that begins the process of withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, which he also did during his first term.