de grote geldbelangen willen handhaving van de stats quo

"It’s a busy week on the climate front for the Trump administration. In Washington, the Environmental Protection Agency and Interior Department are teeing up more rollbacks of Obama-era regulations. In Katowice, Poland, where diplomats are gathered for another round of United Nations climate change negotiations, White House officials are promoting fossil fuels.

My colleague Brad Plumer, who is in Katowice, attended the Trump team’s event, which drew jeers from environmental activists but attracted some powerful potential allies among major coal and oil producers like Saudi Arabia and Australia. Diplomats are starting to ask: Is the United States now actively trying to undermine the Paris Agreement, from which it intends to withdraw?

The realignment is happening against a backdrop of protests in France that President Trump has blamed on the Paris Agreement. Alissa J. Rubin and Somini Sengupta unpacked how the design of France’s carbon tax, and not the drive to reduce planet-warming emissions itself, led to political backlash. You should also check out Somini’s other piece on how the growing rift between the United States and China could undermine global efforts to curb climate change.

But any way you slice the emissions picture, no major country is really on track to meet its Paris Agreement goals, Brad and Nadja Popovich reported.

In the United States, the Trump administration is making it easier to build new coal plants despite the growing urgency of the climate crisis. As my colleague Coral Davenport reported, it’s also chipping away at clean water protections that were put in place during the administration of the first President George Bush. And the administration also rolled back protections for the sage grouse, an imperiled bird that makes its home on millions of acres of oil-rich land in the West, in a bid to spur new oil exploration.

There’s some hope for a different threatened species, however. Kendra Pierre-Louis reports on new research that finds coral reefs may be more resilient to global warming and bleaching than we think. Check out her piece to learn more, and have a great week! Lisa Friedman @LFFriedman

"NYTimes.com" <nytdirect@nytimes.com>