Whatever awful damage Trump does on climate, the whole Republican Party is to blame for it:
At 3 p.m. today, President Trump is set to announce his decision on whether he intends to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord. Most of the reporting suggests he will go through with it.
But if so, the story does not end there — far from it. There will likely be a window of several years before our withdrawal takes effect — and paradoxically, some of the consequences of our pending exit from this 195-country accord could begin to take hold in the interim. Which means it is not totally outlandish to imagine that, if the blowback is severe enough, Trump could come under great pressure to reverse his decision. He almost certainly won’t, but at a minimum, those who care about the Paris deal — and international engagement more generally — can do everything possible to clarify those consequences to the public and ensure that Trump and Republicans own them.
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This raises an important point: If we do see these consequences, they should be tattooed on Republicans. Because, broadly speaking, what we’re seeing now isn’t just Trump’s doing. It’s also the doing of the GOP. While Trump has been most visibly crazy in his assertions that climate change is a hoax, many Republicans have spent years doing a careful little dance in which they avoided fully conceding the anthropogenic global warming threat in the least-crazy-seeming way possible, by claiming, for instance, that “I’m not a scientist,” so you know, who knows whether it’s something to seriously worry about? It has been forgotten, but last year, Mitch McConnell launched a crafty plan to get GOP governors to challenge Obama’s climate policies for the explicit purpose of making it harder for the U.S. to meet its commitments to the Paris deal, thus discouraging other countries from participating.
During last year’s GOP presidential primaries, the GOP candidates kept up the attacks on any and all Obama actions on climate (the GOP posture was to kinda sorta admit climate change is real while opposing just about any government action to combat it). Meanwhile, many of them carefully avoided weighing in on the Paris deal, and I can’t recall them disagreeing with Trump’s vow to shred it with his strong and manly hands. So isn’t it fair to argue that this outcome is pretty much what Republicans implicitly endorsed all along?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/06/01/trump-is-about-to-do-something-terrible-and-destructive-the-gop-must-own-the-consequences/?utm_term=.86f87298aedb
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It's not like this couldn't have been foreseen. 
