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Even though climate change is driven by the greenhouse gases we put into the air when we burn fossil fuels, causing temperatures to rise dangerously by the end of this century, the Trump administration says there's no point in taking preventative measures because the benefits are too tiny.

But in a recent article in Popular Science, IU McKinney Law Professor of Practice Janet McCabe, former Acting Assistant Administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation at the Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama, says that would be a misleading conclusion. Curbing greenhouse gases is a massive international effort that requires lowering fossil fuel consumption through many avenues, McCabe says. "There's no one single thing that's going to be the answer here."

Given the vast amount of greenhouse gases that are emitted around the world, you would not expect any single climate policy, even major ones, to register on the global scale, Professor McCabe says. "Comparing the impact of any individual policy to global climate impacts is just not an appropriate thing to do. The fact that an individual action can be measured to show any impact on a global metric -- that in itself is an indication that the action is indeed meaningful and significant."

Professor McCabe is Assistant Director for Policy and Implementation at IU’s Environmental Resilience Institute. She is also a Senior Law Fellow with the Environmental Law and Policy Center.