NYT: ‘It Isn’t Just the U.S. — The Whole World Has Soured on Climate Politics’ – ‘The retreat from c

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NYT: ‘It Isn’t Just the U.S. — The Whole World Has Soured on Climate Politics’ – ‘The retreat from climate politics has been widespread’
By Admin
September 16, 2025
12:50 pm

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/magazine/climate-politics-us-world-paris-agreement.html

New York Times: It Isn’t Just the U.S. The Whole World Has Soured on Climate Politics. – How do we think about the climate future, now that the era marked by the Paris Agreement has so utterly disappeared?

By David Wallace-Wells
Sept. 16, 2025

Ten years ago this fall, scientists and diplomats from 195 countries gathered in Le Bourget, just north of Paris, and hammered out a plan to save the world. They called it, blandly, the Paris Agreement, but it was obviously a climate-politics landmark: a nearly universal global pledge to stave off catastrophic temperature rise and secure a more livable future for all. Barack Obama, applauding the agreement as president, declared that Paris represented “the best chance we have to save the one planet we’ve got.”
Paris wasn’t just a brief flare of climate optimism. To many, it looked like the promise of a whole new era, not just for the climate but also for our shared political future on this earth. Back then, the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, liked to talk about how sustainability would be for this century what human rights was for the previous one — the basis for a new moral and political order. His successor, António Guterres, turned out to be an even more emphatic climate advocate, treating the Paris Agreement as though its significance approached, if not exceeded, that of the U.N. charter itself.
By design, the treaty wasn’t a one-shot solution, just a first step. Other steps, it was broadly assumed, would follow — toward faster climate action, yes, but also toward greater global cooperation, mutual obligation and solidarity. High off the success of its Millennium Development Goals, the U.N. had just released its far more ambitious Sustainable Development Goals, which brought the rich nations of the world into its lasso of responsibility. Diplomats talked optimistically about an emergent partnership they called the G2, with the United States and China cooperating on the world’s biggest challenges, as they had in Paris.

https://www.climatedepot.com/2025/09/16/nyt-it-isnt-just-the-u-s-the-whole-world-has-soured-on-climate-politics-the-retreat-from-climate-politics-has-been-widespread/