Trump pulls out of global climate treaty

WASHINGTON - US President Donald Trump announced on Jan 7 that he was withdrawing the United States from the bedrock international agreement that forms the basis for countries to rein in climate change.

The treaty, which has been in place for 34 years, counts all of the other nations of the world as members.

In a social media post, the White House announced that Mr Trump signed a presidential memorandum that pulled the United States from the climate pact and 65 other international organisations and treaties that “no longer serve American interests”. About half of those are UN organisations.

“As this list begins to demonstrate, what started as a pragmatic framework of international organisations for peace and cooperation has morphed into a sprawling architecture of global governance, often dominated by progressive ideology and detached from national interests,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement.

The climate treaty, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, was established in 1992 and is referred to as the UNFCCC. It formed the legal foundation for the Paris agreement, a 2016 voluntary pact among nations to keep global temperatures at relatively safe levels.

The administration said it was also pulling the United States from the top UN climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as well as a host of other major international environmental organisations. They include the International Renewable Energy Association, which represents global clean energy interests, the International Solar Alliance and the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

The moves cement the United States’ isolation from the rest of the world when it comes to fighting climate change.

The decision is not only an indicator of America’s rejection from global diplomacy, it’s a finger in the eye to the billions of people, including Americans, suffering intensifying wildfires, storms and droughts, threats to the food supply and to biodiversity, and other dangerous and costly effects of a warming planet.

“It sends a major signal around the world of US disdain for climate policy that’s essential for the world,” said a professor specialising in international law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, Jean Galbraith.

Mr Trump has already taken steps to withdraw the United States from the Paris agreement. That will become official Jan 20.

“This is a shortsighted, embarrassing and foolish decision,” said Ms Gina McCarthy, the White House climate adviser during the Biden administration. She said the Trump administration was discarding decades of global collaboration.

“This administration is forfeiting our country’s ability to influence trillions of dollars in investments, policies and decisions that would have advanced our economy and protected us from costly disasters wreaking havoc on our country,” she said.

Mr Trump’s retreat on climate cooperation comes as the United States’ main rival on the world stage, China, has come to dominate the clean energy technologies of the future.

At the same time, many of the United States’ most powerful allies, including Australia, Britain and the EU, are also advancing their ambitions to reduce emissions of planet-heating greenhouse gases and ramp up renewable energies.

Mr John Kerry, the US global climate envoy during the Biden administration, said the withdrawal would be “a gift to China and a get-out-of-jail-free card to polluters who want to avoid responsibility”.

The treaty withdrawal would take a year to go into effect once the United States files a formal notice with the UN. Once finalised, the United States would no longer take part in annual negotiations among 200 nations aimed at encouraging countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

By a unanimous vote, the US Senate ratified the UN climate treaty in 1992. A president’s legal authority to unilaterally withdraw from a treaty is questionable, and the Supreme Court has never definitively ruled on the issue.

And yet as a practical matter, past presidents have been able to do so. When President George W. Bush withdrew the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, for example, only a few members of Congress objected.

Some legal scholars have said withdrawing from the UN climate framework would make it difficult, if not impossible, for the United States to return under a future president without another Senate vote.

Others, including Prof Galbraith, said a future president could bring the US back into the treaty relatively easily. The two-thirds Senate vote that took place in 1992 remains in effect, she said, and does not get nullified if a president walks away from the agreement.

The decision to withdraw is part of an aggressive assault on climate efforts by Mr Trump. His administration has rolled back climate regulations, removed scientific data on climate change from government websites, thwarted the development of wind and solar energy and commissioned a federal report downplaying the effects of a warming planet.

In February 2025, he instructed the State Department to review US support for all global agreements and organisations, including the UN climate framework. The White House imposed a 180-day deadline for that review, which expired in early August.

No other country has followed the United States’ lead in pulling out of the Paris deal.
It remains unclear whether the exit from the underlying convention would inspire other countries to follow suit. NYTIMES