Trump is abdicating all the countrys moral power
With his backward policies and his tiresome antics, President Trump seems to be trying his best to do something that ought to be impossible: make the U.S. presidency irrelevant to world progress.
Climate change offers one example. Trump tried hard to build suspense for Thursday’s announcement about whether he would honor or trash the landmark Paris accord; doubtless he’d rather have attention focused on greenhouse gases than on the snowballing Russia investigations. At this point, however, I have to wonder what difference the decision to leave the agreement actually makes.
Trump’s pro-coal program of deregulation — a quixotic attempt to revive an industry being strangled by global market forces, not politicians — and his boosterish advocacy of oil and gas mean the United States has little chance of meeting its Paris emissions targets anyway. The real-world impact of Trump’s choice is more diplomatic than environmental.
More important are his domestic policies. And even if Trump succeeds in weakening federal fuel-economy standards, automakers will be unable to ignore California’s tougher requirements, which are also imposed by about a dozen other states — making up more than one-third of the U.S. vehicle market. The administration can seek to override the California standards, but such a move would lead to a lengthy court battle. George W. Bush filed such a challenge in 2007, but California sued, and the case was still pending when Barack Obama took office in 2009 and abandoned it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-abdicating-all-the-countrys-moral-power/2017/06/01/709ad08a-4705-11e7-98cd-af64b4fe2dfc_story.html?utm_term=.dbb86b3d8930&wpisrc=nl_rainbow&wpmm=1
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