Donald Trump has sparked outrage by announcing the US will exit the foundational international agreement to address the climate crisis, cementing the US’s utter isolation from the global effort to confront dangerously escalating temperatures.
In a presidential memorandum issued on Wednesday, Trump withdrew from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), along with 65 other organizations, agencies and commissions, calling them “contrary to the interests of the United States”.
The UNFCCC treaty forms the bedrock of international cooperation to deal with the climate crisis and has been agreed to by every country in the world since its inception 34 years ago. The US Senate ratified the treaty in October 1992.
Trump has, however, routinely ridiculed climate science as a “scam” and a “hoax” and has actively hobbled clean energy projects and other climate policies as president, attempting to force the US and other countries to stay wedded to the fossil fuels that are driving disastrous heatwaves, storms, droughts and conflicts that imperils billions of people around the world.
Simon Stiell, the UN’s climate chief and executive secretary of the UNFCCC, described the move as a “colossal own goal”. He said: “While all other nations are stepping forward together, this latest step back from global leadership, climate cooperation and science can only harm the US economy, jobs and living standards, as wildfires, floods, mega-storms and droughts get rapidly worse. It is a colossal own goal which will leave the US less secure and less prosperous.”
“This is a shortsighted, embarrassing and foolish decision,” said Gina McCarthy, who was a top climate adviser to Joe Biden’s White House.
“As the only country in the world not a part of the UNFCCC treaty, the Trump administration is throwing away decades of US climate change leadership and 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.”
Manish Bapna, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said Trump’s decision to exit the UNFCCC is an “unforced error” and “self-defeating” as it will further hamper the US’s ability to compete with China, which is increasingly dominant in the world’s burgeoning clean energy technology industries.
“While the Trump administration is abdicating the United States of America’s global leadership, the rest of the world is continuing to shift to cleaner power sources and take climate action,” Bapna said.
“The Trump administration is ceding the trillions of dollars in investment that the clean energy transition brings to nations willing to follow the science and embrace the cleanest, cheapest sources of energy.”
Underscoring the administration’s hostility to any measure to deal with a climate that is now hotter than at any point in human civilization, the White House memo also states that the US will pull out from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN’s top climate science body, as well as an assortment of other international environmental organizations, including the International Renewable Energy Association, the International Solar Alliance and the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
Last year, Trump said the US would exit the Paris climate deal, in which countries agreed to limit dangerous global heating, while the administration also declined to send a delegation to UN climate talks in Brazil.
As the UNFCCC treaty was ratified by the Senate, it is unclear whether Trump can unilaterally scrap it, or whether a future president will be able to rejoin the framework without a further Senate vote. “Letting this lawless move stand could shut the US out of climate diplomacy forever,” said Jean Su, energy justice director at the Center for Biological Diversity.
Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, said in a statement that the agreements jettisoned by the administration on Wednesday are “often dominated by progressive ideology and detached from national interests”.
The climate crisis is, in fact, a matter of scientific consensus and is already taking a measurable and growing toll upon economies and people’s lives. In the US, record numbers of major extreme weather disasters are forcing insurers to flee states, undermining the country’s property market. Scientists have warned that global temperatures are set to breach previously agreed thresholds, which will trigger further worsened calamities.
“On the one-year anniversary of the wildfires that stole dozens of lives, thousands of homes and the sense of safety for millions as it reduced Los Angeles communities to ash, Trump is making it clear he has no interest in protecting Americans from the rapidly increasing impacts on our health and safety of the worsening climate crisis,” said Loren Blackford, executive director of the Sierra Club. “This is not leadership. It is cowardice.”
Al Gore, the former US vice-president and climate activist, told the Guardian: “The Trump Administration has been turning its back on the climate crisis since day one, removing the United States from the Paris Agreement, dismantling America’s scientific infrastructure, curbing access to greenhouse gas emissions data, and ending essential investments in the clean energy transition.”
“They’ve done this at the behest of the oil industry, so that billionaires can rake in even more money while polluting our planet and endangering people in America and around the world,” Gore said.
Other organizations and agencies that the US will quit include the Carbon Free Energy Compact, the United Nations University, the International Cotton Advisory Committee, the International Tropical Timber Organization, the Partnership for Atlantic Cooperation, the Pan-American Institute for Geography and History, the International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies and the International Lead and Zinc Study Group.
The state department said additional reviews are ongoing.
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