World faces climate and hunger test

US President Donald Trump has signed an "Energy Independence Executive Order" to "annul" Barack Obama-era legislation on reducing coal, oil and gas production and curbing carbon emissions. On his first visit to the Environmental Protection Agency last month, Trump signed the order, freeing the fossil fuel industry from the legislative tether and raising questions on the United States' commitment to climate change agreements, especially the 2015 Paris climate pact.

The Trump administration has not said it will pull out of the Paris agreement, but even the slightest change to, let alone a total rollback of, Obama's Clean Power Plan will make it almost impossible for the US to honor its international climate commitments. Trump's repeated questioning of humans' role in climate change, promise to slash EPA funding, and appointment of anti-climate change litigator Scott Pruitt as EPA chief and former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, had already put a big question mark on the US role in the global fight against climate change. The executive order now clears all doubts of the US under Trump not meeting its internationally agreed emission reduction target.

When the $1.1 trillion budget outline was released in March making good Trump's campaign promises, including reducing EPA by one-third, Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said those programs (environmental protection plans) are "a waste of your (taxpayers') money". On the fight against climate change, Mulvaney said: "We're not spending money on that anymore."