President-elect Donald Trump has indicated that he would withdraw the U.S. from a global climate change agreement when he assumes office — but a second withdrawal could look different from the first.
The Paris Climate Agreement was established at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in 2015 as a legally binding treaty between nearly 195 parties who are committed to international cooperation on climate change. The U.S. officially entered into the agreement under former President Barack Obama in 2016.
Under Article 28 of the treaty, parties are allowed to withdraw from the agreement, but no earlier than three years after they officially entered. Therefore, Trump was barred from immediately leaving the treaty when he first took office and the U.S. was not officially withdrawn until the end of 2020.
President Joe Biden, in one of his first orders as president, reinstated the U.S. to the climate agreement in 2021. Ahead of the presidential election, Trump told Politico that he would be in favor of withdrawing from the treaty a second time, and given that Biden withdrew at the beginning of his term, this could be accomplished at a much quicker pace.
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“It would be a very different timeline now,” David Waskow, director of the international climate initiative at the World Resources Institute, told Scientific American.
Max Boykoff, professor in the Department of Environmental Studies and a fellow in the Cooperative Institute for Research and Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at CU Boulder, told the university’s paper that re-exiting from the agreement could cause “a loss of trust” among world leaders.
Boykoff also suggested that a U.S. withdrawal could encourage other countries to also exit the treaty, as it was recently reported that Argentina’s Libertarian President Javier Milei is considering it.
“The withdrawal may also cause other leaders, who have also expressed resistance to addressing climate policy as a priority in their own countries, to leave the agreement,” Boykoff told CU Boulder Today.
However, those in favor of Trump releasing the U.S. from the agreement tell Fox News Digital that there would be many benefits to a second withdrawal.
“The benefits of exiting the Paris climate agreement are many, first and foremost reclaiming U.S. sovereignty while respecting the rule of law,” said H. Sterling Burnett, Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute.
“Paris encourages the U.S. to agree to emission reductions that are both unnecessary from a climate perspective, since we don’t control the climate, but which do place substantial costs on Americans while putting the nation at a competitive and geopolitical disadvantage to China, which emits more than double the U.S. with no firm reduction commitments,” he added.
Burnett also suggested that Trump submit the treaty to the Senate for advice and consent, which would require a two-thirds vote for the U.S. to rejoin the climate agreement — creating a potential hurdle for future administrations seeking to reenter the accord.
Also under consideration is whether the incoming president will withdraw from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), a treaty established in 1992 to prevent “dangerous human interference with the climate system.”
Mandy Gunasekara, former EPA chief of staff during Trump’s first term, suggested that the incoming president should not only withdraw from the treaty, but also exit UNFCCC, POLITICO E&E Reported.
Gunasekara said that the administration should get out of UNFCCC “if they’re looking for a more permanent response to getting out of bad deals for the American economy that do little to actually improve the environment.”
Other leaders have suggested that the Paris Agreement itself could suffer in the future if the U.S. is not involved.
“The Paris Agreement can survive, but people sometimes can lose important organs or lose the legs and survive. But we don’t want a crippled Paris agreement. We want a real Paris agreement,” Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, told the Guardian. “It’s very important that the United States remain in the Paris Agreement, and more than remain in the Paris agreement, that the United States adopts the kind of policies that are necessary to make the 1.5 degrees still a realistic objective.”
