Opinion | How oil made Donald Trump turn his back on Paris climate accord

Dozens of flights in the US southwest cancelled because the air is too hot to allow some planes to take off. Recreational islands near Toronto submerged, forcing businesses to close for good. Tidal flooding in residential areas of South Florida, even in the absence of stormy weather. These are just a few recent examples of extreme weather in North America. All of them disruptive, costly and unprecedented in scale, at least within the time frame of recent history.

Yet no scientist can say conclusively that these are a result of industrial activity pushing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, as Nasa points out, higher than they have been in the past 400,000 years.

Because of this inability to provide irrefutable proof, and amid concern about the jobs threatened by efforts to rein in carbon dioxide emissions related to the burning of fossil fuels, President Donald Trump and his administration said they have prioritised the economic health of coal and oil producers.

Let’s look at the issue from a different perspective. Trump has few enthusiastic supporters among US billionaires. Warren Buffett, Michael Bloomberg, and Apple CEO Tim Cook all supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. Tech billionaire Peter Thiel emerged as a financial backer, but the extensive coverage of that was notable only because it stood in stark contrast to the very vocal anti-Trump sentiment in Silicon Valley.

Trump made the announcement alongside his appointee to the head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, who previously fought against the EPA’s regulation of oil and gas producers and the electric utilities that burn coal. Pruitt endorsed Trump’s view that the Paris agreement was an international plot against American business.

The publication of emails in February, shortly after Trump appointed Pruitt as EPA chief, revealed regular contacts between Pruitt in his former position as Oklahoma’s attorney general, and Koch-funded groups. Appointing the EPA’s biggest opponent to direct the organisation showed the lengths Trump will go to, to protect oil and coal companies.