President Donald Trump is set to make good on a campaign pledge to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement, joining Nicaragua and Syria as the only other countries to have done so, according to multiple inside sources.
Devised at the COP21 Climate Conference in December 2015, the Paris Climate Agreement contains binding provisions to be met by the 195 signatory countries that aim to minimise global climate change through limiting and mitigating greenhouse gas emissions.
A long-time climate change sceptic, having once described goal warming as a hoax invented by the Chinese, Trump had signalled his desire to withdraw from the agreement while on the campaign trail. It was not until last week’s G7 summit in Taormina, Italy, however, that he announced that his final decision on the matter was incoming.
While Trump has been teasing his final announcement on Twitter, news outlet Axios reported on Wednesday that he has “made his decision to withdraw” and that “details on how the withdrawal will be executed are being worked out by a small team including EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt”. Axios cited two anonymous sources with “direct knowledge of the decision”.
Pruitt, who occupies a strange position as a climate sceptic head of the Environmental Protection Agency, is believed to have had a strong influence on the final decision, along with Steve Bannon. Trump’s final decision will have come following disagreement from many of his closest advisers, with Pruitt and Bannon on the side of leaving, but others, including his daughter Ivanka and former-ExxonMobil chief executive Rex Tillerson, favouring staying in the deal.
There are major logistical issues related to pulling out of the agreement. While the Paris Agreement is an independent deal, much of the legislation underpinning it comes from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC).
According to Axios, the small team are “deciding on whether to initiate a full, formal withdrawal — which could take 3 years — or exit the underlying United Nations climate change treaty [UNFCC], which would be faster but more extreme.”
Exiting the treaty itself would in fact take more than three years. Fact-checking website Snopes spoke to Holly Doremus, professor at Berkley Law School, who explained: “Article 28 of the Paris Agreement allows any party to notice its withdrawal three years from the date on which the Agreement entered into force for that party [November 4, 2016]. That means the earliest date on which the U.S. can formally notice its withdrawal would be November 4, 2019. Withdrawal becomes effective no sooner than one year later. So the US can’t withdraw from Paris alone until November 2020.”
European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker offered starkly un-minced words with respect to Trump’s apparent decision, also explaining that leaving the agreement is far from simple.
“The Americans can’t just leave the climate protection agreement,” he said. “Mr Trump believes that because he doesn’t get close enough to the dossiers to fully understand them. It would take three to four years…to leave the agreement.”
He went on: “We tried to explain that to Mr Trump in Taormina in clear German sentences. It seems out attempt failed, but the law is the law and it must be obeyed. Not everything which is law and not everything in international agreements is fake news.”
While full withdrawal from the UNFCC would, in theory, be quicker (taking a year) but, as Snopes explains, “where the ultimate authority to pull out of that treaty lies is a legally complicated issue”.
The issue is that because the UNFCC was ratified by George W Bush with consent from congress, “there is a plausible argument that the president may not withdraw from the UNFCCC without the Senate’s consent…[since] termination of a law requires action by the same institutional actors that adopted the law”.
Furthermore, a climate focused news agency Climate Home reported that, according to internal sources, that Trump had pushed Pruitt to come up with an exit strategy from the Paris Agreement that “does not include leaving the UNFCC”.
The latest word from Trump on the matter was a Tweet saying: “I will be announcing my decision on Paris Accord, Thursday at 3:00 P.M.”
