United States

Scuttling U.S. participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, reconsidering the Keystone XL pipeline, and withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement

Among Trump’s first steps as president were executive actions aimed at fulfilling a number of his most prominent campaign promises. In addition to directives paving the way for the unraveling of Obamacare and guaranteeing nonparticipation by the United States in the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, a trade deal championed by Obama, Trump was quick to reverse Obama’s policies directed at protecting the environment. The new president signed memoranda that set the stage for reconsidering the Keystone XL pipeline—a 1,179-mile (1,897-km) oil pipeline project that had been rejected by his predecessor in 2015—as well as the Dakota Access Pipeline, the completion of which entailed construction of a section cutting across part of the Missouri River that would potentially endanger the water supply of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and which had been halted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers pending the completion of an environmental impact statement. Trump’s actions were aimed at delivering on his campaign promise to expand U.S. energy exploration and production. The new president’s most controversial policy decision in the first six months of his presidency regarding the environment came in June 2017, when he announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change, a broad range of measures (agreed to by 195 countries) aimed at limiting increases in worldwide temperatures and mitigating the economic consequences of global warming. Trump, who doubted that climate change was real, argued that the agreement was unfair to the United States and that its mandate for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions would damage the U.S. economy.