A movement is afoot by a United Nations-backed group to get U.S. cities to rebel against President Trump's decision to abandon the Paris climate deal.

And it's quietly becoming a huge success.

ICLEI, founded in 1990 as an international network of local and regional governments committed to "sustainability," is rounding up support for a massive resistance movement by American cities in which they would forge ahead with what Trump has called a "bad deal for America."

At least 267 mayors and governors have signed an open letter sent to the "international community and parties to the Paris Agreement" stating their commitment to the Paris climate deal, whether the president supports them or not.

TRENDING: Man arrested for alleged brutal attack on 77-year-old veteran wearing a MAGA hat

"They are the radicals," said Patrick Wood, an Arizona-based author, economist and expert on global governance. "They are the more aggressive mayors. Many are the early adopters of this radical climate policy."

ICLEI now is bringing pressure on cities to join the fray of Trump rebellion.

"They were presenting this year at the U.S. Conference of Mayors," Wood said. "They are the operational side of evolving cities with sustainable development, ducking cities into sustainable development policies. They set the policy or strategy at the U.N., but then someone has to go and do it, carry it out, the tactical side – that's ICLEI."

ICLEI is featuring an article on its website titled "How your local government can support the Paris Agreement" in which it gives instructions to local officials on how to flout Trump's pledge to back out of the deal.

Nearly every city of any consequence is a member of ICLEI. On its website, ICLEI encourages its member cities to go against Trump on the Paris climate deal.

"Declare that 'We Are Still In,'" says the ICLEI statement on climate change.

"Mayors, council members, county supervisors, and other elected officials can join more than 1,300 others and sign your name to the Open letter to the international community and parties to the Paris Agreement from U.S. state, local, university, and business leaders to declare that your community supports the goals of the Paris Agreement."

ICLEI also encourages mayors to join its delegation to an upcoming global summit on climate change called COP23.

"While the U.S. national delegation withdrawals its voice from the international climate dialogue, ICLEI will continue to represent local governments in the process," it states. "Local elected officials interested in joining ICLEI’s COP23 delegation in Bonn Germany this November may express interest in credentials by emailing Executive Director Angie Fyfe at [email protected] Organized by ICLEI, and co-hosted by the City of Bonn and the State of North Rhine-Westphalia at COP23, the Cities and Regional Pavilion is open November 9-14, with the Leaders´ Summit will take place on November 12."

Bill Clinton to the rescue

ICLEI even has a big political personality to coax its member cities into action – none other than former President Bill Clinton.

Clinton was a featured speaker at the annual meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors on June 24, and he used part of his speech to incite a backlash against Trump's anti-Paris climate stance.

Clinton applauded efforts by many U.S. cities to embrace the Paris climate deal even as Trump has abandoned it, but he cautioned words mean little without action because “the water’s going to keep rising.”

Pittsburgh has more than 13,000 clean-energy jobs, and rooftop gardens are becoming a local industry in New York City — proving the transition to sustainable living is good economics.

“I think this is something mayors can talk about with facts, not rhetoric,” Clinton said.

Pushing to the left

ICLEI has been pushing U.S. cities to the left on the political spectrum for years, says Wood.

"Bill Clinton originally helped the U.N.-connected ICLEI get established in the U.S., and is leading the pack in pushing cities to personally adopt the Paris Climate Agreement in spite of Trump’s rejection," he said. "This divide-and-conquer strategy will further shred the Constitution."

ICLEI tells its members to monitor and track carbon emissions and to "report findings to a global platform."

This can be made more efficient by installing a "leading emissions-management software platform used by hundreds of U.S. cities to track GHG emissions and plan for reductions," states the organization on its website.

"Talk about an end-run around national sovereignty," Wood said. "Here you have cities tracking and monitoring everything their citizens do and reporting it to the United Nations or some other global body."

He continued: "Clinton is fanning the embers of the ICLEI-United Nations agenda. He addressed U.S. mayors and gave quite a speech that was full of factual misstatements, which Clinton is known for, but he completely got behind ICLEI's efforts to subvert the Constitution and get more mayors involved in foreign policy."

Wood said the Logan Act prohibits mayors, governors and other non-federal officials from signing agreements with foreign governments, and Gov. Jerry Brown of California is pushing the limits of this prohibition in the deal he signed recently with China.

"We used to complain that is was the federal government that was subverting the Constitution," Wood said. "Now we are also getting this sort of grassroots, bottom-up subversion."

Cities leading the way to the 'new world order'?

The key role of cities in establishing a "new world order" was predicted by Richard Gardner in his 1974 article in Foreign Affairs magazine, "The Hard Road to World Order."

"Gardner was one of the original members of the Trilateral Commission, and his prediction is exactly what's happening today," Wood said. "It's a bottom-up approach we see unfolding."

If Gardner was the prophetic voice of the new world order based on technocracy, then Parag Khanna is its leading street preacher today.

Khanna's book "Technocracy in America" is all the rage for corporate elites and the young, often highly educated hipsters immersed in the global sustainability movement.

"Among all the scholars, Khanna is the darling of the global elite right now," Wood said. "Khanna is kind of like a young Zbigniew Brzezinski. He's a very attractive, bright guy, but they're hanging on every word he says. It's radical stuff, but he's completely in line with the U.N.. When he goes and speaks to the World Economic Forum, the elites are really soaking up everything this guy says."

And what is Khanna telling these globalist elites?

His message is that nations are old-fashioned dinosaurs that don't much matter in the 21st century.

"His policy states that the future of the world is based on the cities and global city-states, not on the nation states," Wood said. "All the U.N. documents have no scholarship behind them; they're just policy statements. So Khanna is one of the scholarly backups to all that comes out of the U.N."

The deconstruction of nation states

One of Khanna's previous books was "Connectography," which described how the world's cities are going to be connected together according to the functions they provide to the global economy.

"You have software providers, you have airports, you have rail, and all the things you need for the global economy. He has mapped all this out. So the city state is being lifted up as the building block of the future," Wood said. "He openly calls for the deconstruction of national governments. In other words, he's saying that we need to minimize the power of nations and take all the functions that the national governments have and give that power to the cities, because that's where everything is happening anyway."

Of course, it helps that while Congress and the White House are controlled by Republicans, more than 80 percent of U.S. cities over 100,000 in population are run by Democrats.

So it's against this backdrop that Trump is fighting to keep the United States out of a climate deal he knows is bad for America and will cost middle-class Americans dearly in terms of jobs, lower salaries and higher costs for energy.

"So looking at what ICLEI is saying today, you can see the Khanna-U.N. policy playing out because what they are saying is, 'Screw the federal government. You need to assert yourself and stand up and be counted as part of the global community directly,'" Wood said.

"They think they are hiding behind some kind of a cloak, but we can see it so clearly."

What's even more disturbing to watchdogs like Wood is that almost all of the U.S. cities pushing forward with the U.N. "climate change" agenda are doing it without so much as holding a public hearing, let alone a voter referendum.

It's being done on the sneak, as many mayors are counting on their constituents being clueless about the entire agenda.

"Whether they know it or not, this policy is designed, I believe, to follow along with people like Parag Khanna, who is brilliant, even likable, but he's a bad actor as far as nationalists are concerned," Wood said. "This is all part of a plan to deconstruct national governments, take power away from them."