http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/19/us/politics/trump-climate-change.html
The article above covers the uncertainty of the Paris Climate Accord that was agreed to last year in the wake of Donald Trump being elected president. It is widely known that Trump has stated that he wants to withdraw the US from the Paris Climate Accord. The international political community is currently divided on this issue, and now they are trying to decide what they will do if Trump does withdraw the US from the Accords, "some diplomats turned from talking of rising seas and climbing temperatures toward how to punish the United States if Mr. Trump follows through, possibly with a carbon-pollution tax on imports of American-made goods". This tax would be based on the amount of emissions that US companies have. If a company goes and switches to renewables and substantially reduces their footprint, then the tax would be decreased. Essentially they are trying to go through with the Paris Climate Accord by going around Trump.
I personally believe that this is an important discussion for world leaders to be having right now. So much is uncertain with a Trump presidency, and it is important to plan for the worst. This deal is extremely monumental because it got countries to come together and agree about something they usually do not agree about. I think that it is great that they are planning on how they can still implement this on the US, even if Trump backs out. However, I do believe that they need to be careful. Trump can often be irrational and as a result, he might resort to extreme measures if they go through with this.
This seems to be a common theme in a lot of circumstances that have to do with cooperation with international institutions. Somebody wants to pull of out / restrict something, which frustrates who they're trying to cooperate with, which causes those people to retaliate with more restrictions of their own, which in t=return make nobody better off. This seems to be happening in Brexit, in the Paris Climate Accord, the TPP, and tariffs on US companies moving abroad. It's strange, I need to look more into it.
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