Background: US President Joe Biden presents his national statement as part of the World Leaders’ Summit of the COP26 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow on November 1, 2021. | Photo by EVAN VUCCI/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
The US is doing a pretty horrible job of following through on promises it’s made to tackle climate change, according to two separate new studies. A global ranking of countries completed by Yale and Columbia found that the US now ranks 43rd among 180 nations that Columbia and Yale evaluated in their most recent Environmental Performance Index (EPI). That’s a major plummet since the last time the researchers ranked countries in 2020, when the US was in 24th place.
When it comes to climate indicators alone (the evaluation also considers countries’ progress on other kinds of pollution and efforts to protect ecosystems), the US fell all the way to 101 from its previous spot at 15th place. The US’s ranking was reported by The…