# Paris Agreement The Paris Agreement is the 2015 international climate accord, negotiated under the [[United Nations]] climate framework, in which nearly every country pledged to cut greenhouse-gas emissions to hold global warming "well below" 2°C (and ideally to 1.5°C) above pre-industrial levels. For the vault it functions as the central symbol of international climate cooperation that the American right has worked to discredit and exit — the treaty that became a litmus test for the [[Climate Change Denialism]] and anti-globalism politics documented across the vault's climate cluster. ## What It Does The agreement works through "nationally determined contributions" — each country sets its own emissions-reduction targets and reports on progress, with no binding enforcement mechanism. Its strength is near-universal participation; its weakness is that compliance is voluntary. Adopted in December 2015 under the [[Barack Obama]] administration, it was hailed as a diplomatic breakthrough and criticized by skeptics as toothless, economically burdensome, or both. ## The American On-Again, Off-Again Relationship The United States has joined and left the agreement twice, tracking the partisan swing of the presidency. Obama entered it in 2016; [[Donald Trump]] announced withdrawal in 2017 (effective November 2020); Biden rejoined in 2021; and on January 20, 2025 — the first day of his second term — Trump signed Executive Order 14162, "Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements," ordering immediate withdrawal again, this time effective January 2026. The 2025 exit also canceled billions in U.S. climate-finance pledges to developing nations. This whiplash has made the United States the least reliable major party to the accord. ## RWKB Significance The Paris Agreement is where the vault's [[Climate Change Denialism]] and anti-globalism strands meet policy. Opposition to it is a fixture of the [[Fossil Fuel Industry and Climate]] influence network and the broader [[The Climate Denial Machine]], which frames the accord as an assault on American sovereignty and prosperity rather than a response to the science laid out in [[Climate Science]]. Trump's twin withdrawals are the clearest executive-branch expression of that politics, and they sit alongside his exits from the [[World Health Organization]] and other bodies as pillars of the 2025–2026 retreat from multilateralism. ## See Also - [[Climate Science]] - [[Climate Change Denialism]] - [[The Climate Denial Machine]] - [[Fossil Fuel Industry and Climate]] - [[United Nations]] - [[Donald Trump]] - [[Barack Obama]]