Story highlights Trump reportedly meeting with advisers to mull pulling out of Paris Climate Agreement. If it pulls out, US would be sole signatory among 196 to do so

Jeffrey Sachs: Transition to a low-carbon economy well underway, and oil companies agree. If Trump pulls out, he will look like an incompetent

Jeffrey Sachs is a university professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.

(CNN) President Donald Trump is expected to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, senior US officials familiar with his plans told CNN Wednesday. While not unexpected, this is a major break that would isolate the United States in global climate change efforts. Naturally, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, a career-long, oil-industry shill from Oklahoma, has argued to pull out.

Yet even Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, former CEO of ExxonMobil, is arguing to stay . If Trump goes with Pruitt instead of Tillerson, he will immediately create a worldwide consensus on climate action: to fight the American recklessness that Pruitt epitomizes.

I happened to have been in the White House (discussing solutions to the AIDS epidemic) the day in early 2001 that George W. Bush Jr. pulled the US out of the Kyoto Protocol to limit greenhouse gas emissions. The move was a predictable disaster: it delayed effective global action on global warming for another 15 years. Yet Bush used an argument then that is utterly closed off today.

The Bush administration argument in 2001 was that the US should not commit to Kyoto until China and other large middle-income emitting countries also commit to it. This attitude had been pushed by the Senate in the 1997 Byrd-Hagel Senate Resolution, passed 95-0, which had signaled that the Senate would not ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

JUST WATCHED Sachs on EPA's Pruitt "he's a stooge" Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Sachs on EPA's Pruitt "he's a stooge" 01:38

Under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), to which the US is a signatory, the high-income countries (so-called Annex I countries) were obligated to move first. China, a non-Annex I country, was legally correct under the UNFCCC to tell the U.S., "After you, thank you." Nonetheless, Bush responded politically, not legally: No thanks to Kyoto, we'll move when China and other developing countries move.

Read More