Is Trump abandoning global climate pact?
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump says he will announce his decision on whether to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord during a Rose Garden event Thursday afternoon. Mr. Trump promoted his announcement Wednesday night on Twitter, after a day in which U.S. allies around the world sounded alarms about the likely consequences of a U.S. withdrawal. Mr. Trump himself kept everyone in suspense, knocking down early reports that he had already decided to withdraw and saying he was still listening to “a lot of people both ways.”
The White House was seen as signaling that Mr. Trump was likely to decide on exiting the global pact — fulfilling one of his principal campaign pledges — though top aides were divided. And the final decision may not be entirely clear-cut: Aides were still deliberating on “caveats in the
language,” one official said.
Everyone cautioned that no decision was final until Mr. Trump — who has declared that abandoning the Paris climate agreement would be a victory for the American economy, and has said he thought climate change was a “hoax” — announced it. The president has been known to change his thinking on major decisions and tends to seek counsel from both inside and outside advisers, many with differing agendas, until the last minute.
Abandoning the pact would isolate the U.S. from a raft of international allies who spent years negotiating the 2015 agreement to fight global warming and pollution by reducing carbon emissions in nearly 200 nations. While traveling abroad last week, Mr. Trump was repeatedly pressed to stay in the deal by European leaders and the Vatican. Withdrawing would leave the United States aligned only with Russia among the world’s industrialized economies.
American corporate leaders have also appealed to the businessman-turned-president to stay. Even fossil fuel companies such as Exxon Mobil, BP and Shell say the United States — which, according to experts, has contributed more than any other country to the atmospheric carbon dioxide that is scorching the planet — should abide by the deal.
Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and a member of a White House manufacturing jobs advisory board, tweeted that if Mr. Trump does exit, he would have “no choice” but to end his affiliations with the administration.
Mr. Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama enacted the deal without U.S. Senate ratification. A formal withdrawal would take years, experts say, a situation that led the president of the European Commission to speak dismissively of Mr. Trump on Wednesday.
Mr. Trump doesn’t “comprehensively understand” the terms of the accord, though European leaders tried to explain the process for withdrawing to him “in clear, simple sentences” during summit meetings last week, Jean-Claude Juncker said in Berlin. “It looks like that attempt failed,” Mr. Juncker said.
Some of Mr. Trump’s aides have been searching for a middle ground — perhaps by renegotiating the terms of the agreement — in an effort to thread the needle between his base of supporters who oppose the deal and those warning that a U.S. exit would deal a blow to the fight against global warming as well as to worldwide U.S. leadership.
Mr. Trump met Wednesday with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who has favored remaining in the agreement. Chief strategist Steve Bannon supports an exit, as does Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt.
Mr. Trump’s chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, has discussed the possibility of changing the U.S. carbon reduction targets instead of pulling out of the deal completely. Senior adviser Jared Kushner generally thinks the deal is bad but still would like to see if emissions targets can be changed.
Mr. Trump’s influential daughter Ivanka’s preference is to stay, but she has made it a priority to establish a review process so her father would hear from all sides, said a senior administration official. Like the other officials, that person spoke only on condition of anonymity.
In addition, a group of 22 Republican senators — including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, RKy. — wrote to Mr. Trump urging “a clean break” from the Paris agreement.
Democrats, environmentalists and economists warned that an exit from the Paris accord would be reckless and ultimately hurt the U.S. Some noted that no other country has said it would join the U.S. in withdrawing or reducing its commitment. Only two nations, Nicaragua and Syria, have declined to join the Paris agreement.
Mr. Trump has several options, climate experts said.
The U.S. could stay in the accord and choose not to hit its goals or stay in the pact but adjust its targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Another option would be for Mr. Trump to withdraw from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the treaty on which the Paris accord was based, which would take only a year.