President Donald J. Trump said Wednesday that the United States would withdraw from the bedrock international agreement that forms the basis for countries to rein in climate change.
The agreement, which has been in place for 34 years, counts all of the other nations of the world as members.
Mr. Trump announced the decision as part of presidential memorandum withdrawing the United States from a raft of international organizations and treaties that the administration claimed no longer serve American interests, the White House said in a social media post.
The decision not only sends a powerful signal of America’s withdrawal from global diplomacy and leadership, but is 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.
The move sealed the United States’ isolation in the world on climate action. The agreement, officially known as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, was established in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Known by its acronym, UNFCCC, it was the foundation for the Paris agreement a decade ago, a voluntary pact among nations to slow down global temperature increases to relatively reasonable levels.
Mr. Trump has already moved to withdraw the United States from the Paris agreement. That will become official on Jan. 20.
President 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 European Union, are also advancing their ambitions to reduce emissions of planet-heating greenhouse gases and ramp up renewable energies.
“The world’s most phenomenal geopolitical player, its largest economy, its second largest emitter, is basically checking out,” the European Union’s climate commissioner, Wopke Hoekstra, said in a recent interview referring to the U.S. posture on the Paris agreement.
The withdrawal would take a year to go into effect once the U.S. files a formal notice with the United Nations. Once finalized, the U.S. would no longer take part in annual negotiations among 200 nations aimed at encouraging countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
“It sends a major signal around the world of U.S. disdain for climate policy that’s essential for the world,” said Jean Galbraith, a professor specializing in international law at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.
The U.S. Senate ratified the U.N. climate treaty unanimously 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 U.S. 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 U.N. 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 Ms. Galbraith said a future president could bring the U.S. back into the treaty relatively easily. The two-thirds Senate vote that took place in 1992 remains in effect, she said, and doesn’t get nullified if a president walks away from the agreement.
The decision to withdraw is part of an aggressive assault on climate efforts by President 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 he instructed the State Department to review U.S. support for all global agreements and organizations, including the U.N. 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.
Somini Sengupta is the international climate reporter on the Times climate team.
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