US quits Paris climate pact

This is one of those situations where you should be shaking your head, even if you're a climate change denying conservative or a fussil fuel industrial interest.

The Paris pact was pretty toothless: it was a step forward, but heavily aspirational. Indeed, one of the stated complaints of conservatives was that it did nothing to enforce compliance. The Trump Administration could have just as well ignored it without formally reneging on it and forced the next administration to deal with the egg on the face for failing to meet the USA's commitments.

But instead he's seriously undermined people's ability to trust in the United States maintaining its international obligations for anything except the shortest periods of time. To be fair, what he's done already with NATO is far worse. But this underlines the reality that the United States government is so unstable that it's unable to uphold any coherency in policy or meet its stated commitments.

If you're a small country who's been trusting the USA as a solid ally against regional competitors, you're looking at this and going, "well, maybe I should be focusing more on ties with the EU/Russia/China/India."

It's honestly pretty humiliating for the USA, even aside from the fact that we've just fucked the next generation just to give the finger to elitist liberals and scientists.

Perhaps the US isn't a good global leader. It is, after all, only the aftermath of WW2 that left enough of a power vacuum for two countries at the edges of "proprer civilisation" like the USA and Russia to take the central position as the world superpowers.

I wouldn't be sad if the USA returns to a position of only interfering within its sphere of influence in North and South America.

Being a global leader isn't merely about the power to do so, but about caring about other countries to the point that you see them as directly intertwined with your own. The USA, for better or worse, has always viewed other nations as 'other'.

Umm, I think people who say things like "20+ years..." haven't been paying attention to the change in rate of large scale social change over the last few decades.

Do you really think anyone could have predicted today in 1997 ? (today as in, Brexit, Trump, Nsa/Privacy, Fb...etc)

I think you overstate the case when you say that the US's leadership position has been destroyed. It has certainly been damaged, but the US is still one of the largest, most populous and richest countries in the world. It will have a big seat at the world negotiating table for quite some time no matter what.

> Also, China emits twice as much greenhouse gas as the United States.

Not per capita, which is what is relevant when it comes to setting a country's policies.