WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the entire United Nations climate-fighting apparatus takes America’s environmental isolation to another level and is likely to damage both the United States and the world as the planet flirts with ecological tipping points, experts say.
Leaders from around the world say the United States will be left behind as more than 190 other nations join in what they call a blossoming green economy that is transitioning from polluting coal, oil and gas to cleaner and cheaper solar, wind and other renewable energies.
Wednesday’s action starts the process to pull the U.S. out of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It’s the main way nations negotiate, monitor and enforce agreements to curb worsening climate change, and is a bigger step than Trump’s 2017 and 2025 withdrawals from the bedrock 2015 Paris Agreement aimed at limiting warming.
The framework was negotiated in Brazil in 1992, championed by Republican U.S. President George H.W. Bush and ratified unanimously by the U.S. Senate. It’s what Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden used to justify signing and reactivating the Paris deal without needing Senate approval. The Trump administration also withdrew Wednesday from a United Nations climate science panel, a biodiversity-saving effort and the Green Climate Fund to help poor nations as well as many other international collaborations.
“It is a more serious step definitely. The world loses a lot and it is very damaging,” said Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “The U.S. turns its back against science, against global collaboration, against any kind of action on climate change. So, yes, in that sense, it’s more fundamental and more damaging” than earlier efforts.
“This is the gateway to the preeminent international forum for combatting climate change,” said University of Pennsylvania law professor Jean Galbraith, an expert on international treaties.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in announcing the U.S. withdrawal, said the Trump administration “has found these institutions to be redundant in their scope, mismanaged, unnecessary, wasteful, poorly run, captured by the interests of actors advancing their own agendas contrary to our own, or a threat to our nation’s sovereignty, freedoms, and general prosperity.”
Since 1850, the United States has put more than 480 billion tons (440 billion metric tons) of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the air through the burning of coal, oil and natural gas. That accounts for nearly one-quarter of the world’s historic emissions of a gas that stays in the atmosphere for more than a century, according to the scientists at the Global Carbon Project.
Emissions keep rising despite Paris agreement
Under the Paris agreement, countries voluntarily pledge to curb emissions by various amounts, but each year global emissions continue to rise. The United States, under the Biden administration, had promised to cut its emissions by 61% to 66% by 2035.
“It will mean more warming because the U.S. is not going to be fulfilling its obligations of reducing their emissions,” said Adelle Thomas, climate adaptation director of the Natural Resources Defense Council and also a vice chair of the U.N. climate science panel that Trump is quitting.
And it comes at a critical time as Earth is approaching 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming since pre-industrial times — the internationally agreed warming threshold established in Paris, Thomas and Rockstrom said.
“We need to start reducing emissions globally by 5% per year,” Rockstrom said. “It’s our last chance. And exactly at that moment, the biggest player in the world steps out of the game.”
The world is perilously close to several “tipping points’ of irreversible change, such as coral reef loss, said former Ireland president Mary Robinson, a tireless climate change advocate for the group of retired leaders called The Elders.
”We really have no time and it is so unbelievably stupid at one level and reckless for the Trump administration to be taking the steps that they are taking,” she said.
Another step in U.S. shift away from leading on climate
In past international climate negotiations, especially when Democrat John Kerry was secretary of state or America’s top climate envoy, the United States kept oil countries, such as Saudi Arabia, from watering down deals too much, experts said. But that was missing last November in Brazil’s negotiations, which the U.S. skipped under Trump.
Kerry called Trump’s action “a gift to China and a get-out-of-jail free card to countries and polluters who want to avoid responsibility.”
Tom Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, which represents industries that emit much of the heat-trapping gases, said “removing the U.S. from the U.N. climate framework will accelerate a positive shift towards abandoning the destructive global climate framework.”
Thomas, Rockstrom and Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rican diplomat who helped fashion the Paris agreement, said the United States is leaving itself behind in a new, cleaner world of cheaper energy and more jobs.
UNFCCC Executive Secretary Simon Stiell said Trump’s move will hurt the U.S.
“It will mean less affordable energy, food, transport and insurance for American households and businesses, as renewables keep getting cheaper than fossil fuels, as climate-driven disasters hit American crops, businesses and infrastructure harder each year,” he said.
Some environmental advocates have feared that future presidents won’t be able to easily reinstate the U.S. to the climate convention in an era when Senate approval would likely be far harder.
But Sue Biniaz, a former State Department lawyer and deputy chief negotiator who now teaches at Yale, said the next president would have the power to undo Trump’s action.
“I wouldn’t want to say any sort of damaging action or inaction is irreversible,” Biniaz said. “I imagine a future U.S. government would work with other countries to revive as much as possible. We did that in 2021 after the first Trump administration.’’
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