Allow me to catch you up on how America is faring in the fight against climate change: not well. President Trump is attacking the country’s environmental rules in a way that he never did in his first term. He’s trying not only to repeal rules limiting air and water pollution but also to undo the Environmental Protection Administration’s ability to regulate climate pollution — even whether it can define carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

Perhaps even more important, his volatile trade policy of the past weeks is helping to usher in a new and more paranoid era. This will weaken all of America’s systematic strengths in combating climate change, make us poorer and get us virtually nothing in return.

The core of the climate problem — especially for the next 75 years — is that the billions of people living in the world’s middle-income countries want to get richer. But if we want to avoid catastrophic global warming, then they need a way to achieve that prosperity without burning gargantuan quantities of fossil fuels as Europe, the United States, Russia and China have done.