Trump Is Pulling U.S. Out Of The Paris Climate Accords

President Donald Trump is once again withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate accords, pulling the nation whose factories, cars and power plants contributed the most cumulative planet-heating pollution to the atmosphere out of the first global pact to slash carbon emissions enough to prevent the world’s average temperature from reaching dangerous new heights.

Trump said Monday he plans to halt implementation of the federal government’s efforts to meet its target to slash America’s greenhouse gas emissions by up to 66% below 2005 levels over the next 10 years. The move, expected to come from an executive order, would follow the approach he took in 2017.

The announcement, made in an email from the White House laying out Trump’s policy priorities, will put the U.S. in league with Iran, Libya and Yemen as the only United Nations-recognized countries outside the global pact.

The next steps include formally announcing the U.S. withdrawal to the U.N. Once that step is taken, the process will go much faster than the last time the U.S. quit the Paris Agreement under Trump’s direction.

Under the U.N. rules at the time, the U.S. withdrawal took three years to take effect, allowing former President Joe Biden to swiftly reinstate American participation in the accords. This time, however, the U.S. could completely quit the Paris Agreement in just one year.

“It is deeply regrettable that the United States has signaled its intention to withdraw from the Paris Agreement once more. In doing so, the United States will join a tiny club of countries outside of the global consensus,” said Kaveh Guilanpour, the vice president of international strategies at the Washington, D.C.-based climate group C2ES. “There is no sugar-coating this — it will be harmful to global efforts to combat climate change, and so ultimately, also harmful to the future prosperity and security of U.S. citizens.”

Since the early 1990s, the parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change have gathered annually to discuss ways to coordinate a global effort on cutting the emissions from fossil fuels and agriculture that accumulate in the atmosphere and prevent the sun’s heat from radiating back into space. It wasn’t until 2015 that China and the U.S. signed on to a global pact explicitly designed to cut emissions.

The deal — brokered in Paris when France hosted the roving annual conference typically held in November — was hailed as a triumph of international negotiations between the world’s two biggest economies, and a turning point in a new era of rapidly worsening weather extremes.

Yet agreeing to cut emissions proved harder than actually scaling back the pollution.

For nearly a decade, the rich countries who bear the most collective responsibility for changes to the atmosphere refused to fork over the billions of dollars pledged to help poorer nations develop new, cleaner energy sources to lift themselves out of poverty and build infrastructure to adapt to the rising seas and more violent storms already occurring.

Since joining the Paris Agreement, China, the world’s current largest annual emitter of carbon, has undertaken the biggest and fastest build-out of renewable energy plants, nuclear reactors and electric vehicle infrastructure of any major economy. Chinese-made batteries, electric cars and solar panels are now exported so cheaply that the Biden administration and regulators in the European Union slapped trade restrictions on Chinese imports in an attempt to preserve domestic companies.

Former President Joe Biden’s landmark climate-infrastructure laws spurred dozens of new battery factories in the U.S. and invested billions into manufacturing solar panels and producing metals like lithium at home. But red tape and permitting issues stymied construction of the charging networks needed to make electric vehicles a viable option in a continent-sized nation with limited transportation alternatives to driving.

Trump has vowed to undo the Biden administration’s policies to support electric vehicles, and pledged to bar construction of any new wind turbines during his new term.

“America will be a manufacturing nation once again and we have something no other manufacturing nation will ever have: the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth — and we are going to use it,” Trump said in his speech immediately following his swearing-in Monday. “We will bring prices down, fill our strategic reserves up again right to the top, and export American energy all over the world. We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it.”

Chris Wright, Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Energy, has promised to continue the build-out of renewables, especially solar energy, and has put a particular focus on nuclear power, which is set for a comeback thanks to billions of dollars of federal support the Biden administration directed to new reactor developers.

At the last two U.N. climate summits, the Biden administration led pledges to build more nuclear reactors around the world in an effort to sell more American technology to newcomer countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America that want to start using atomic energy.

The new Trump administration is likely to continue that push.

When Trump last yanked the U.S. out of the Paris accords, critics warned that the move ceded climate leadership to Beijing as China continued ramping up its production and exports of green technologies.

But in an opinion piece in Foreign Policy earlier this month, two experts from the Breakthrough Institute, a California-based climate think tank that does research that supports using more nuclear power and mining the energy-transition metals over which China holds a near monopoly, urged poor countries to quit the Paris Agreement. They described the agreement as overly focused on abstractions instead of practical concerns such as building the infrastructure needed to survive a hotter world.

“Rich countries have been unable to devise — let alone finance — a clean development path for the developing world. Trump pulling out of the Paris Agreement will only be the final nail in the coffin of a failed process,” Vijaya Ramachandran and Ted Nordhaus wrote.

“While Western donors fret over whether investing in roads is ‘green,’ China has been more than willing to help poor countries build urgently needed infrastructure — as have India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey,” they added. “It is up to poor countries to seize the moment and return to their own priorities with investments in energy, agriculture, infrastructure, and jobs.”