What Trump's Climate Views Might Mean for World: QuickTake Q&A

President Donald Trump hasn’t pulled the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, the climate-change accord among almost 200 countries that have committed to cutting greenhouse-gas emissions. But he’s taking steps that may make it virtually impossible for the U.S. to carry out its part of the deal. In rolling back the 2015 Clean Power Plan, Trump is targeting the key driver of what his predecessor, Barack Obama, hoped would be a revolutionary shift in electrical power generation, away from coal and toward wind, solar and natural gas.

By executive order, Trump is starting to unravel a raft of rules and directives aimed at combating climate change. He says those regulations hurt the U.S. economy by killing jobs related to fossil fuels, especially coal mining. He’s repealing a 2016 policy that urged federal regulators to consider climate change in environmental reviews, rescinding directives compelling government agencies and the military to plan for rising temperatures, and ending an Obama-era policy of considering the "social cost of carbon" when weighing the impact of government policies. The Interior Department also will swiftly reverse a moratorium on the sale of new rights to extract coal on federal land.