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Trump’s exit from Paris Climate Agreement becomes official

04 November 2020
 Dan Ackermann

Call it the long goodbye from the Paris Climate Agreement.

Driving the news: President Trump’s 2017 announcement withdrawing America from the 2015 accord becomes official at midnight Wednesday after a prolonged process required by the United Nations. It’s a chaotic coincidence that it comes the day after Election Day.

Where it stands: The outcome of the presidential election was unclear as of midnight. If Joe Biden wins the White House, he has vowed to return to the deal.

  • Trump’s official exit from the deal would be fleeting, but America's retreat on climate change over the last four years would linger and be laborious to reverse.

The intrigue: Wednesday’s news is anti-climatic from the administration’s perspective. In Trump’s mind, he exited the deal the day he announced his intention to do so in June 2017, according to Axios’ Jonathan Swan.

  • A White House spokesperson declined to comment and referred Axios to the State Department, which has authority over global deals. The department is also not expected to mark the exist in any official way.
  • The administration took the formal step to withdraw a year ago Wednesday, per U.N. rules. “No additional action is required by the United States for the withdrawal to take effect,” according to a State Department statement emailed Monday.

The big picture: The United States is the only nation in the world to withdraw from the deal, which nearly all countries are a part of. Indeed, most of the world is moving ahead with varying levels of ambition to address climate change and move to cleaner sources of energy regardless of who the U.S. president is.

  • In just the last few weeks, China, South Korea and Japan have announced ambitious goals, joining those already made by Europe. Although they’re merely stated goals, they still signal intent and direction of government priority.

The bottom line: America’s next president will influence the pace and smoothness of the transition, but he will not influence whether it’s happening or not.

Go deeper: Trump’s Paris endgame is here

Transcripts show George Floyd told police "I can't breathe" over 20 times

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Newly released transcripts of bodycam footage from the Minneapolis Police Department show that George Floyd told officers he could not breathe more than 20 times in the moments leading up to his death.

Why it matters: Floyd's killing sparked a national wave of Black Lives Matter protests and an ongoing reckoning over systemic racism in the United States. The transcripts "offer one the most thorough and dramatic accounts" before Floyd's death, The New York Times writes.

The state of play: The transcripts were released as former officer Thomas Lane seeks to have the charges that he aided in Floyd's death thrown out in court, per the Times. He is one of four officers who have been charged.

  • The filings also include a 60-page transcript of an interview with Lane. He said he "felt maybe that something was going on" when asked if he believed that Floyd was having a medical emergency at the time.

What the transcripts say:

  • Floyd told the officers he was claustrophobic as they tried to get him into the squad car.
  • The transcripts also show Floyd saying, "Momma, I love you. Tell my kids I love them. I'm dead."
  • Former officer Derek Chauvin, who had his knee on Floyd's neck for over eight minutes, told Floyd, "Then stop talking, stop yelling, it takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to talk."

Read the transcripts via DocumentCloud.