White House officials clash over canceling Paris accord

WASHINGTON — The White House is fiercely divided over President Donald Trump’s campaign promise to “cancel” the Paris agreement, the 2015 accord that binds nearly every country to curb global warming, with more moderate voices maintaining that he should stick with the agreement despite his campaign pledge.

Stephen Bannon, Trump’s senior adviser, is pressing the president to officially pull the United States from the landmark accord, according to energy and government officials with knowledge of the debate. But, they say, he is clashing with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump, who fear the move could have damaging diplomatic ramifications.

Donald Trump vowed on the campaign trail to tear up President Barack Obama’s global warming policies, and on the home front he is moving aggressively to meet those pledges with deep cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency and a new EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, a skeptic of climate science.

Next week, Trump plans to sign an executive order directing Pruitt to start the legal process of unwinding Obama’s EPA regulations for cutting greenhouse pollution from coal-fired power plants. Those regulations are the linchpin of the last administration’s program to meet the nation’s obligations to reduce climate emissions under the Paris agreement.

While the president cannot, as Trump suggested, unilaterally undo a 194-nation accord that has been legally ratified, he could initiate the four-year process to withdraw the world’s largest economy and second-largest climate polluter from the first worldwide deal to tackle global warming. Such a move would rend a global deal that has been hailed as historic, throwing into question the fate of global climate policy and, diplomats say, the credibility of the United States.

But it would also demonstrate to his supporters that Trump is putting U.S. coal interests ahead of a global deal forged by Obama.