The Paris agreement is complex and works in a slow bureaucratic manner. It’s a mostly voluntary climate pact originally written in ways that would both try to reduce a worsening climate change problem and withstand the changing political winds in the United States.

The United States’ second exit from the Paris Agreement wasn’t unexpected. Even before he was reelected, now-president Donald Trump had promised for months that he would pull the country out of the United Nations pact to limit global warming: the Paris climate “ rip-off ,” as he called it.

Trump signed an executive order that begins the process of withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, which he also did during his first term.