Activists display signs in the People’s Climate March in Vancouver, British Columbia, on September 21, 2014.
Credit: Chris Yakimov

During the negotiations over the Paris Agreement on climate change in December 2015, Sunita Narain, an environmental activist from India, argued for a focus on the ties between global inequality and consumption by the relatively wealthy. “An inconvenient truth is that we do not want to talk about consumption or lifestyle,” she asserted.

It may be difficult to recall following Donald Trump’s inauguration, but it was little more than a year ago when delegates representing the world’s governments approved the United Nations accord. They pledged to prevent a temperature increase “well below” two degrees Celsius, and to strive to limit it to 1.5 degrees, over the average global temperature before the Industrial Revolution.

If there was hope that the United States would take the steps needed to meet its commitments through decisive action by the federal government, it is now diluted markedly.

It’s not that the Obama administration was leading the United States on a sufficiently […]