Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, has announced that the Trump Administration will repeal the Clean Power Plan.
Credit: Saul Loeb / AFP

On September 20th, in New York, while the United Nations General Assembly was in session, France’s President, Emmanuel Macron, spoke with a group of reporters about how he might persuade President Donald Trump to do something—anything—to address climate change. Efforts to get the United States to remain in the Paris accords had not been going well, Macron said. (Trump had announced his intention to leave, but, as a practical matter, that will take time.) This was largely owing to the fact, Macron added, that what the Trump Administration proposed—namely, to renegotiate the accord—was “something we do not accept.” But Macron, with his technically minded optimism, had a plan. Trump might never like Paris because it was an “Obama deal,” and because he believed that his voters were against it, Macron said, but those same voters were now confronting the reality of climate change in the form of escalating hurricanes. […]