Critics, supporters differ widely about withdrawal’s effect

President Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement drew the ire of top environmental and science groups Thursday, who called it a major step backward both for the climate and the country as a leader in environmental issues.

The U.S. might as well put up a “closed for business” sign up across America, said Nathaniel Keohane of the Environmental Defense Fund. “Both for symbolic and practical purposes, it signals an American leadership retreat.”

Jake Schmidt of the Natural Resource Defense Council said that “stepping back from such a historic agreement means we’re not prepared to be leaders on the global stage.”

The 197-member Paris climate agreement requires every country to establish ambitious targets to reduce the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. Only two countries didn’t sign: Nicaragua and Syria. The U.S. is the secondleading emitter of greenhouse gas emissions behind China.

Despite Trump’s declaration that the Paris Accord is a bad deal for the U.S. because of the “draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country,” Keohane said com- panies looking to invest in clean energy such as solar and wind will just go to Europe or China instead, taking away jobs from the U.S. “The losers will be American families and workers and businesses of being at the cutting edge of clean economy,” he said. The move had its defenders. The climate treaty “is climatically insignificant,” said Patrick Michaels, a climatologist at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. He said the deal would lower global warming only by less than four-tenths of degree by 2100, a finding the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reported.

In addition, private investments in technological innovation mean America already leads the world in reducing carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, Michaels said. “We did that without Paris, and we will continue our exemplary leadership without it.”

Fred Palmer of the free-market think tank Heartland Institute, which has received funding from oil and gas companies, said Trump will set the U.S. down a path “where our fossil fuel resources are unleashed to power our future and drive our prosperity.”

The “anti-fossil-fuel Paris Accord .... is a disastrous plan for working men and women and the country itself — and he pledged to discard it in the presidential campaign,” Palmer said.