During his rally in Florida in December of 2016, Donald Trump promised to cancel all payments to the United Nations climate programs. He proposed that the payments could be more beneficial if used in the United States alone. Trump promised to spend the money that would have gone to the UN for environmental projects at home, which includes repairing the Herbert Hoover Dike in Lake Okeechobee and protecting the Florida Everglades. The Obama Administration pledged to donate $3 billion by the year 2020, but this will not happen.

What Trump seemed to miss is that climate change is a much larger and more apparent problem that needs to be addressed immediately. Helping the United Nations to slow down the rate of climate change would benefit the U.S., even more so than fixing a couple dikes. Climate change affects the whole planet. The small home repairs that Trump promised to complete distract from the big picture: the doom of rapid climate change.

Trump has been known to dip his toes into the pool of climate-change deniers. He once tweeted that climate change was a hoax created by the Chinese to stop competition in U.S. manufacturing. This claim is incorrect. He later labeled his tweet as a joke and said that climate change is naturally occurring and not caused by human activities. Both claims are incorrect.

Multiple studies posted within peer-reviewed scientific journals show that at least 97 percent of actively publishing climate scientists agree: climate-warming trends over the past century are mostly caused by human activities. Human activities are changing the way natural greenhouse gases in the Earth’s ozone layer absorb and radiate heat. Over the last century, the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil has increased the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide. This happens because the coal or oil burning process combines carbon with oxygen in the air to make CO2. 

“The effects of climate change are staggering and detrimental,” Peter J. Phillipps, meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), said when asked if climate change is a true threat. “The increase in overall global temperature will lead to things like more droughts and heat waves, hurricanes becoming stronger and more intense, the arctic melting away to nothing, and the global sea level rising. The planet will be chaotic.”

Animals who live in the arctic will become extinct, crippling with the ecosystem. Droughts and heat waves will lead to death either due to medical conditions like heat stroke or starvation from crops drying out. Hurricanes will wipe out what is left of tropical cities, that is if the rising sea levels don’t swallow them first. All of this and more is at stake, and  Trump doesn’t care.

Not only is the decision to cancel all payments to the UN for climate programs going to ruin the environment, but it’s going to be the first step in ruining the United States’s relationship with other countries. The U.S. has always been the big brother of the world, the one to  looked up to when unsure of the future. This is a worldwide effort and if the whole world doesn’t cooperate, Earth is doomed.

Trump, should not cancel all payments to the UN climate programs. American cannot “be great again”  if the country is underwater, destroyed by hurricanes, or burned to the ground by wildfires. Face the facts. Restoring America does not have to mean destroying the world.