Climate decision on hold
Trump spokesman says president won’t make announcement until after G7 meeting
WASHINGTON — U.S. President Donald Trump is delaying a decision on whether to withdraw from the landmark international climate deal struck in Paris.
White House spokesman Sean Spicer said Tuesday that the president will not make an announcement on the agreement until after the G7 summit in Italy in the end of May. The White House had previously said a decision would be reached before Trump’s appearance at the summit.
A meeting of top White House aides to discuss the agreement had been scheduled for Tuesday, but it was postponed. It was the second time a meeting of top aides on the issue had been delayed.
Spicer said Trump wants to “continue to meet with his team,” seeking advice from both an economic and an environmental perspective as he works to make a decision.
Trump pledged during the presidential campaign to renegotiate the accord, but he has wavered on the issue since winning the presidency. His top officials have appeared divided about what to do about the deal, under which the U.S. pledged to significantly reduce planet-warming carbon emissions in the coming decade.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former chief executive of the oil company Exxon, said at his Senate confirmation hearing in January that he supports staying in the deal. But Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has said the Paris pact “is a bad deal for America” that will cost jobs.
Ivanka Trump, who serves as an adviser to her father, was supposed to meet separately Tuesday with Pruitt and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska. That meeting was also cancelled, according to a White House official who requested anonymity to discuss private talks.
The Paris accord, signed by nearly 200 nations in 2015, was never ratified by the Senate due to the staunch oppositions of Republicans. It therefore does not have the force of a binding treaty, and the U.S. could potentially withdraw from the deal without legal penalty.
A senior administration official said the president’s inclination has been to leave the pact, but Ivanka Trump set up a review process to make sure he received information from experts in the public and private sector before a making a decision. The official requested anonymity to discuss private conversations.
As speculation continues about how Trump will handle the agreement, Tillerson is set to travel to Alaska for an Arctic Summit council this week amid concerns from other nations that the Trump administration will undermine global efforts to address climate change in the Arctic, where rising temperatures are having a disproportionate effect.
David Balton, a top U.S. diplomat who works on environmental issues, said there would be “no change” in U.S. participation even if Trump ultimately decides to pull out of the Paris pact.
“The U.S. will remain engaged in the work that the Arctic Council does on climate change throughout,” Balton said Monday.
In his prior post as the elected attorney general of Oklahoma, Pruitt closely aligned himself with the needs of the state’s oil and gas industry. He repeatedly sued the EPA over restrictions on extracting and burning fossil fuels.