President Trump's withdrawal from Paris pact caps new view on environment

Gregory Korte | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Trump: The U.S. will withdraw from the Paris Accord President Donald Trump has announced the United States will withdraw from the Paris climate agreement.

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s decision Thursday to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement put the rest of the world on notice about a decision he had already made: To stop implementing the Obama-era policies that would have allowed the United States to meet its commitment to reduce greenhouse gasses.

But in making the long-awaited announcement, the president also added a signature Trump condition: That he would be willing to renegotiate the agreement on more favorable terms.

“So we're getting out, but we will start to negotiate, and we’ll see if we can make a deal that’s fair,” he said.

Under the terms of the international agreement to reduce greenhouse gases, the earliest a nation can formally withdraw is November, 2020 — the same month Trump faces re-election. But because the greenhouse gas reduction targets are largely voluntary, Trump said he would immediately "cease all implementation of the non-binding Paris Accord."

European leaders quickly responded that the accord was "irreversible" and not open to re-negotiation. "We firmly believe that the Paris Agreement cannot be renegotiated, since it is a vital instrument for our planet, societies and economies," said a joint statement by Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron.

In a half-hour speech in the White House Rose Garden, Trump did not address the scientific consensus that rising global temperatures – almost certainly caused by human activity since the industrial revolution – is a threat to the planet. He has previously called that science “an expensive hoax” perpetrated by the Chinese, and White House officials have deflected repeated questions about whether Trump still believes that to be the case.

Instead, Trump complained that other countries had attached too many conditions to their commitments — known as nationally determined contributions — to reduce the carbon emissions causing that climate change. As he has with with trade and immigration, Trump accused the rest of the world of taking advantage of the United States.

“At what point do they stop laughing at us as a country?” he said. “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.”

China, for example, said it would begin reducing emissions beginning in 2030 – meaning they could continue to build coal-fired power plants every year until then. "In short, the agreement doesn’t eliminate coal jobs, it just transfers those jobs out of America and the United States, and ships them to foreign countries," he said.

Trump has already made clear that he views the climate accord as an obstacle to his goal of creating jobs and ensuring energy independence. In March, he signed an executive order rolling back most of the Obama-era environmental regulations that the previous administration had used as a U.S. down payment toward its nationally determined contributions.

Still, the rest of the world was watching to see how far Trump will go in backing out of the accord. The White House said Trump "personally explained" his decision Thursday in a telephone call with the leaders of Canada, France, Germany and the United Kingdom.

The decision makes good on a Trump campaign promise to “cancel the Paris Climate Agreement and stop all payments of U.S. tax dollars to U.N. global warming programs.” But Trump has also been known to change his mind, as he did in April with the North American Free Trade Agreement.

By leaving open the possibility of re-entering the agreement, he ended up on the more moderate end of the range of options the White House had been exploring. They ranged from a re-negotiation within the existing framework to a U.S. withdrawal from the underlying United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, a 1992 treaty adopted by every nation in the world that agreed on the need to address warming global temperatures.

Still, Trump's decision remains open to interpretation. White House officials declined to say what form his proposed renegotiation would take, or what Trump would ask for in any new round of talks.

"Though flawed, the climate accord can be fixed," said a statement from House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, a California Republican. "It’s now up to the administration to deliver a better deal.”

Trump cast the decision in terms of his campaign promise to “put America first,” reasserting American sovereignty and rebuffing an attempt by the rest of the world to take advantage of the United States.

“The rest of the world applauded when we signed the Paris agreement. They went wild, they were so happy,” he said. “A cynic would say that the obvious reason for economic competitors, and their wish for us to remain in the agreement. is that we continue to suffer this self-inflicted, major economic wound.”

Trump downplayed the impact of carbon reductions to the environment, saying the plan would only result in a fraction of a degrees’ difference by the year 2100 – gains that could be wiped out by increased emissions by China.

Trump had said he's been lobbied heavily by both sides on the climate agreement. On one side is the economic nationalist wing of his White House, advisers such as Steve Bannon who have called climate change a "manufactured crisis" and who once urged "good global warming skeptics" to leave all the lights in their house on in order to protest the Paris talks. On the other: Business leaders and foreign policy leaders in his own party.

Trump made the long-awaited announcement in the White House Rose Garden, the same place where President Obama hailed the agreement as "a turning point for our planet."

With typical Trumpian flair for building suspense, the president had been promoting his announcement on Twitter for days. It came on a seasonably sunny 82-degree June day, with staffers and supporters ringing the Rose Garden and a Marine Corps jazz quartet providing warm-up music. Even after starting the event a half-hour late, Trump used the attention commanded by the climate announcement to tout his record on jobs, terrorism and the appointment of Justice Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.

Trump's decision came less than a week after Trump met with world leaders in Sicily, where closed-door discussions included pleas for the United States to stick to the consensus agreed to in Paris in 2015 and consummated last year.

In a separate meeting with Pope Francis last week, the pontiff presented Trump with a gift — a copy of his two-year-old encyclical on climate change known as Laudato Si. Francis, who argues that care of God's creation is part of the church's larger concern for the poor, encouraged "continued participation,” in the climate agreement.

Obama, who considered the agreement a signature accomplishment of his presidency, framed it as a key test of American leadership in the world.

“I believe the United States of America should be at the front of the pack,” Obama said in a written statement Thursday. “But even in the absence of American leadership; even as this Administration joins a small handful of nations that reject the future; I’m confident that our states, cities, and businesses will step up and do even more to lead the way, and help protect for future generations the one planet we’ve got.”

Trump said he hoped to continue American leadership on the environment, "but under a framework that is fair and where the burdens and responsibilities are equally shared among the many nations all around the world."

Trump’s EPA Administrator, Scott Pruitt, said the United States could continue to lead by exporting its clean energy technology to other countries to help them reduce emissions, but that the United States had already done its part domestically. “We owe no apologies to other nations for our environmental stewardship,” he said.