While Trump can justify his decisions based on some of the recent failures of the WHO and the Paris Agreement, the withdrawals still carry significant risks for public health and climate change mitigation, which the Trump administration has not shown a plan to address.

Withdrawing from the Paris Agreement won’t affect our climate change outlook much, but it is a missed opportunity to redirect U.S. climate policy toward a more realistic objective. The treaty’s goal of keeping global surface temperatures to roughly 1.5°C (2.7°F) above pre-industrial levels is now practically unattainable after record-hot years in 2023 and 2024, and its secondary 2°C goal also appears to be in peril — a 2024 UN Environment Programme report stated that “emissions must fall 28 per cent by 2030 and 37 per cent from 2019 levels by 2035” to maintain the 2°C goal. Achieving those reductions would undoubtedly require massive, destabilizing changes to economic systems, which are neither desirable nor plausible. However, that provides more justification for the United States to stay in, not to drop out of, the agreement. In his executive order announcing the withdrawal from the Paris accords, Trump even said the U.S. must play “a leadership role in global efforts to protect the environment” — but how can we lead from the sidelines? Withdrawing is a huge missed opportunity to direct international climate policy towards its biggest problems: China’s rise and finding alternative fuel sources.

Domestically, Trump is also missing a large opportunity to combine a center-right "all of the above" energy policy with a center-left "abundance agenda," one that maintains a seat at the table for petroleum and natural gas while we continue to invest in renewable technologies. Nuclear energy should also be part of this effort, and its adoption is squarely in line with both the Trump administration and Paris Agreement’s goals.

The WHO does critical work tracking new disease outbreaks and identifying emerging pathogens, and the U.S. withdrawal threatens its ability to aid this work and maintain the benefits we all receive from it.

Furthermore, our status as a global health leader within WHO is smart diplomacy and advances our national security interests. We can guide ongoing efforts to eradicate polio, protect children from diseases, and mitigate future outbreaks. We also receive benefits, like communications on transnational spread of dangerous viruses, scientific collaboration for each year’s seasonal flu vaccine, and access to information about emerging threats. Lastly, we can investigate global threats, as we did when U.S. scientists joined the WHO delegation that visited China in February 2020 to assess its Covid response.

Both Trump and public health experts have rightly criticized the effusive praise the WHO heaped on China in the early days of the pandemic, even as questions swirled about how the virus spread. In a critical moment for its mission, the WHO seemed more occupied with keeping China happy than fulfilling its obligations to the rest of the world. The organization also failed to acknowledge that Covid was airborne early on, providing more evidence that it was ill-prepared to meet the moment.

Trump is right that the U.S. contributes a disproportionate amount to the WHO compared to China (even though he has exaggerated the magnitude of that difference), and we should push for fairer standards. While it is now starting to diversify its revenue sources, the organization’s reliance on the U.S. is evident in the measures it has already taken since Trump announced the withdrawal order — freezing recruitment and drastically scaling back its travel budget.

With all these issues in mind, leaving the WHO is still not the answer; in fact, leaving will make our problems worse. In our absence, China would likely seek to step up to mold decisions to its will — how does that help the U.S.? If Trump wants to play tough with the WHO, why not stay involved but slash our funding commitments?

In his decades of talking to the public about climate change, he says he’s learned a few things. You have to keep in mind a “time budget” that people will give you to speak with them, as well as a “complexity budget” so that you avoid dumping facts and numbers onto people. Finally, he says, you need to allot a “hope budget” so they don’t get too overwhelmed and depressed.

increasingly, a broad collection of conspiracy groups, extremist movements, political and commercial interests, and at times hostile states, coalesce around crises to further their agendas through online falsehoods, division and hate. They exploit social media moderation failures, gaming their algorithmic systems, and often produce dangerous real-world effects.

Some of the largest accounts sharing falsehoods about the hurricane response – including those with more than 2 million followers – have actively engaged with other forms of mis- and disinformation and hate. This includes anti-migrant conspiracies, false claims of electoral fraud, and antisemitic discourse around the so-called ‘Great Replacement.’ Their role as amplifiers here reveals how diverse groups converge on moments of crisis to co-opt the news cycle and launder their positions to a wider or mainstream audience.

Falsehoods around hurricane response have spawned credible threats and incitement to violence directed at the federal government – this includes calls to send militias to face down FEMA for the perceived denial of aid, and that individuals would “shoot” FEMA officials and the agency’s emergency responders.

Secure energy is prerequisite to the prosperity that lifts people out of poverty.  At the same time, we want to protect the environment while providing this secure energy.  Achieving that will require competing interests to play together in the “radical middle” where conflicting goals collide around energy, the economy and the environment.

More than half of what we consume in the world today is made in countries that use coal to make it. So, we sometimes close our ears and eyes, and say, “We’re green. Just keep making our stuff over there and we’ll buy it on Amazon and have it delivered to our door one small thing at a time.” This is not good for the climate.

Emissions in Asia go into the one unique atmosphere that we all share, and by not reducing our consumption of products, we are simply moving the source of those emissions far away.

Kale is healthy, but it is not dense calorically, so you would have to eat a lot of it. Beef is dense with calories to sustain life, but too much of it is not all that healthy. Wind and solar and hydroelectric power are like kale, ideal if only you could live on the energy it provides.  Coal and oil and natural gas and nuclear power are like cow, less benign, but energy dense. Not just a little denser. Several hundred times denser.

anyone claiming that I'm biased in describing climate change as driven by humans is actually experiencing what Daniel Stone (in our subscribers-only interview) called "affective polarization:" "So if you dislike someone, you're not going to admit they're right, even if the evidence is really clear they're right. It's sort of another example of how polarization drives inefficiency. It could stop us from implementing policies that we would agree on otherwise."

We know what factors drive the Earth's heating/cooling cycles. We know that our planet receives energy from the sun, radiates heat to the atmosphere, and that our atmosphere has certain "greenhouse gasses" that re-radiate that heat back to Earth. In other words, we know that heating/cooling cycles are driven by changes in energy coming in (solar cycle and Earth orbit), changes to the Earth's surface (ice cover, plant cover, and other life) that affect energy going out, and changes to the Earth's greenhouse gasses (concentration of CO2, CH4, water vapor, and others in our atmosphere) that affect energy retention. We can measure those factors today. We have a very good understanding of the solar cycle and our Earth's orbit. We have a very good understanding of our planet's surface. And we have a very good understanding of historical changes to the atmosphere, through ice core data and direct atmospheric measurement. Of the factors that contribute to warming, it's very apparent that only greenhouse gasses have increased over the past century to any significant degree (and the degree of increase is very significant). We are aware of what's causing those factors to increase. The long-lived greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere that keep our planet warm eventually return to the earth, and again to the atmosphere, through a process called the carbon cycle. Many things contribute to this cycle, and there are a lot of great arguments that support that the excess carbon is anthropogenic. One of the best arguments is that the proportion of carbon isotopes in the atmosphere is consistent with an increase in the carbon from organic matter (i.e. burned fossil fuels), and that the increase of these isotopes began with the Industrial Revolution and has increased ever since. The Earth is getting warmer. There is essentially unanimous consensus that the Earth has been warming over the past 100 years.

I think suggesting that the identifiable excess emissions from human activity are not causing the definite increase in global warming is kind of like saying, "sure, there have been a lot more deaths from car accidents after the invention of the automobile, but hey — who can say if that has anything to do with cars? People have been dying in accidents forever."

I’m intrigued by the philosophical arguments for antinatalism, such as those made by Sarah Perry in Every Cradle is a Grave. As far as I can tell, these arguments are a personal exercise in morality: for example, the idea that it is unethical to bring a human into the world without their consent, or that a child might experience extreme suffering in their lifetime, or cause extreme suffering to others. These questions have been asked for literally thousands of years, and are a useful inquiry into the purpose of man and civilization, if only to reaffirm one’s faith in procreation. But today, there is a newer strain of antinatalism weaving its way into the conversation. Unlike these deliberate ethical inquiries, this newer version of antinatalism appears to be a byproduct of social movements, a deeply encoded worldview that perhaps children are not worth having. It is not a decision being weighed against one’s personal moral code, but passively transmitted through a widely-held set of social beliefs.

Some parts of EA, for example, are even pronatalist. Will MacAskill, a founder of effective altruism, believes that children have the potential to “innovate” and be “moral changemakers” (though he personally does not plan to have children). The longtermism branch of EA, which is focused on improving our long-term future, can be understood as pronatalist, though it is not explicitly, nor uniformly, so. MacAskill affirms this position in his most recent book about longtermism, What We Owe the Future.

If “grit” – the desire to persevere when faced with a challenge, popularized by psychologist Angela Duckworth – has been the human trait du jour of the last fifteen-odd years, I suspect that “agency” – a belief in one’s ability to influence their circumstances – could be the defining trait of the next generation.

Teaching kids that the world is programmable – whether it’s through actual coding, games like Roblox and Minecraft, encouraging them to ask for what they want, or even white-hat social engineering – is a critical skill that prepares them to tackle the social challenges of the future.

If Gen X and Millennials grew up with a “digital divide,” perhaps Gen Z will face an “agentic divide”: those who believe they have the power to change their circumstances, versus those who do not. And this belief in personal agency appears to be a critical difference between social movements that have pronatalist versus antinatalist outcomes.

If you believe that the world is shaped by your and others’ actions, then the climate crisis or other global catastrophic risk don’t look quite so scary: they’re an opportunity to do something meaningful. If you believe that the world’s problems are solved by people, then having children doesn’t seem like a waste of resources; it seems, in fact, like the most good you could do in the world.

If our social attitudes towards agency are as important as they seem, we should measure its prevalence in the general population, then find ways to track it over time.