Trump withdraws the US from Paris climate agreement

This explainer was updated by Umair Irfan in December 2018 and draws heavily from a card stack written by Brad Plumer in 2015. Brian Resnick contributed the section on the Paris climate accord in 2017.

There’s a vast and growing gap between the urgency to fight climate change and the policies needed to combat it.

The latest round of rumors about the Trump administration and the Paris climate agreement has taken us to a strange place, a kind of linguistic Wonderland where words and meanings dance and shift before our eyes. Passions run high, but about exactly what, no one quite knows.

Let’s walk through it.

President Donald Trump has called climate change a “hoax” and a very expensive “tax” on American businesses that make the United States less competitive. In June, he announced that it was in the best interest of the country to withdraw from the Paris climate accord drawing on several bogus arguments.

His administration has also axed several regulations issued by President Obama to limit greenhouse gas emissions and reduce the impacts of climate change. The latest to fall: a 2015 directive to federal agencies requiring them to account for sea-level rise and storms when making grants and building infrastructure.

French President Emmanuel Macron doesn’t kid around.

Last week, the newly minted French leader delivered a bruising rebuke of Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris accord in a televised address. And in a jab at just how backward US climate politics have become, he invited American climate researchers to move to France.

Last Thursday, President Donald Trump made what is surely to be one of the most fateful decisions of his presidency: The United States will withdraw from the Paris climate agreement.

For hundreds of businesses, states, and local governments already deeply engaged in helping the US meet its commitment to cut greenhouse gas emissions under the agreement, Trump’s decision was thoroughly unacceptable. And so this week, they’ve announced to the world they are still part of the agreement, with or without the federal government.

Larry Summers, the Harvard professor, former Treasury secretary, and National Economic Council director, has a piece in Monday’s Washington Post that that makes a very big claim: The steady progress of human civilization could now stop and go into reverse.

In the last three-quarters of a century, the world has steadily become a safer, healthier, richer place, he writes.

President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement has come under attack from elected officials across the United States and the CEOs of some of America’s biggest companies. But it’s also likely to cause anger and unease at a surprising place: the Pentagon.

That’s because some of the Defense Department’s top officials have already expressed their fears that a warming planet poses serious threats to the US. Defense Secretary James Mattis told the Senate Armed Services Committee that climate change would make the world less stable and require the entire government to curb it. Obama’s last defense chief, Ashton Carter, said that climate change was a top strategic challenge for the US on par with terrorism and North Korea’s nuclear program.

After months of waffling and reality show–style intrigue, President Donald Trump announced on Thursday that he’d decided to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement.

In a speech that was stunning in its deceptiveness, he argued the agreement is unfair to America, has damaged our economy, and will hasten other countries’ theft of US jobs. “This agreement is less about the climate and more about other countries gaining a financial advantage over the United States,” he said. Of course, none of this is true.

By pulling out of the US out of the Paris climate agreement, President Donald Trump made a decision that could reverberate across generations into the future.

It appears that Steve Bannon, White House counsel Don McGahn, and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt — advisers with nationalist ideology and fossil fuel industry allegiances — were the leading influences on his decision.

Yesterday, President Donald Trump gave a speech announcing that the US would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement.

It is a remarkable address, in its own way, in that virtually every passage contains something false or misleading. The sheer density of bullshit is almost admirable, from a performance art perspective. Trump even managed to get in some howlers that had nothing to do with climate change. He started by citing an act of terrorism in Manila that wasn’t terrorism. He said, “our tax bill is moving along in Congress,” but there’s no tax bill. And so forth.

For the past decade, Fox News has been a haven for climate change denialism, shielding viewers from the evidence that humans are causing global temperatures to rise. Perhaps no other news outlet has done as much to harden the view, among conservatives, that global warming is a fiction.

But on Thursday, just a few minutes before President Donald Trump’s announcement that the United States would back out of a major international climate agreement, Fox did something startling and utterly off brand.

President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement has been portrayed in some press coverage as a decision driven by either his personal idiosyncrasies or the policy agenda of White House chief strategist Steve Bannon. And while there’s an element of truth to that, it misses the big picture.

The reality is that this isn’t just a story about Trump — it’s a story about the Republican Party and the conservative movement, which has adopted a rock-solid, widespread consensus in opposition to any serious action aimed at the US reducing carbon emissions. This has become a bedrock belief of the modern GOP.

After President Trump told the world the United States was going to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, many foreign leaders came out to show their displeasure.

But it looks like we have a winner for the best response to Trump. After putting out a joint statement with Germany and Italy, French President Emmanuel Macron went out and gave a pretty epic three-minute statement — in English.

President Trump made a lot of dubious complaints about the Paris climate agreement in his announcement Thursday to withdraw from it. But most perplexing of all was this:

“As of today,” Trump said in the White House Rose Garden, with a jazz band sitting idly by, “the United States will cease all implementation of the nonbinding Paris accord and the draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country.”

President Trump has long talked about how he wants to run the federal government like a business. Many of his Cabinet members came from the corporate world. On matters ranging from health care to taxes, he routinely solicits the advice of his business associates.

But when it comes to climate change, Trump has actively ignored corporate leaders’ calls to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. On Thursday afternoon, he announced his decision to pull out of the Paris climate deal — fulfilling a promise he made on the campaign trail, but breaking with some of the CEOs who have advised him. At least one of those CEOs, Elon Musk, said he would quit Trump’s advisory council as a result.

In his speech announcing that the US would be withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, President Trump framed the action as an act of solidarity with the Rust Belt voters who helped deliver him the presidency. “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” he said.

To which Pittsburgh’s mayor promptly responded: Actually, we’re with Paris on this one.

In a highly anticipated move, President Trump just pulled the United States out of the Paris climate agreement. He cited economic and employment concerns, claiming that the agreement hurt the US in order to benefit others. He said he hoped the US could renegotiate the deal to make it better for America.

But under the current agreement, he said, the US was getting laughed at for being taken advantage of. “We don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us anymore, and they won’t be. They won’t be,” he assured a friendly audience in the White House Rose Garden.

President Trump’s announcement that he will pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord has been met with no shortage of fierce blowback — from former President Barack Obama, CEOs, city mayors, and now the Weather Channel.

Right after Trump shared his decision in the White House Rose Garden, Weather.com ceded its prime homepage real estate to explaining why, and how, this could have serious consequences for Earth going forward:

As the Trump administration moved to unravel his legacy in climate policy, former President Barack Obama did what he is best known for: He responded with hope.

But not without making absolutely clear that he thinks President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement is wrong and will hurt the American people. The Obama administration was a major player in the agreement negotiations, and signed the deal alongside 194 countries in 2015.

President Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement is a moral outrage and an insult to future generations.

For the scientific community, it also stokes another fear: that America now appears to be an anti-evidence, backward-thinking place, undeserving of top scientific talent.

Long before he even declared his run for the White House, Donald Trump has been issuing periodic statements affirming his belief that man-made global warming is a myth, meant to stifle US manufacturing. While as recently as 2009 he was cosigning letters with other business leaders calling for “meaningful and effective measures to control climate change,” since about 2011 he has been tweeting his climate denialism regularly, a denialism that culminated in his exiting the Paris climate agreement on Thursday.

Most of his tweets involve some kind of confusion between climate and weather (“hey, it’s cold outside, global warming must be fake”) or condemnation of President Obama for making climate change a priority, which Trump interpreted as foolish. While the vast majority of the tweets predate Trump’s campaign, a couple were issued during the 2016 Republican primary, where this kind of climate change denial was common among candidates.

Perhaps the most telling thing President Trump said in his rambling justification of his decision to pull out of the Paris accords on climate change wasn’t about climate change at all. It was, rather, about the speedy advance of his administration’s tax bill in the United States Congress.

The thing about this is there is, literally, no tax bill.

Keeping a key campaign promise, President Trump announced Thursday that the US will be pulling out of the Paris climate agreement. Trump, speaking from the White House Rose Garden, decried the agreement as a “bad deal” and an effort to “redistribute wealth” from America to the rest of the world.

In condemning the agreement, Trump talked about his commitment to the “citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” to coal miners, and to cement workers. He also assured the nation that he “cares deeply” about the environment.

Elon Musk is severing ties with the Trump administration over Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate deal, he announced in a Thursday afternoon tweet.

Musk was one of several Silicon Valley leaders who urged Donald Trump to remain in the agreement. Apple CEO Tim Cook called the president on Tuesday to urge him to keep the US in the climate deal.

President Donald Trump announced his decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord at 3 pm Eastern in the White House Rose Garden. A live stream of the announcement is embedded above.

Multiple reports indicate that Trump is likely to announce a withdrawal from the agreement — though many of these reports have expressed at least some uncertainty, including about precisely what language Trump would use.