The US will withdraw from the treaty underpinning all major international climate agreements and the UN climate science body, according to a White House memo.
United States President Donald Trump has openly scorned the scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet and has pulled the US out of the landmark Paris climate accord in both of his terms. Source: AP / Evan Vucci
United
States President Donald Trump is withdrawing the US from a foundational
climate treaty and the world's leading global warming assessment body,
as part of a sweeping exit from the United Nations system, the White
House announced on Wednesday.
A total
of 66 international organisations — comprised of "35 non-United Nations
(UN) organizations and 31 UN entities" — were named in a White House
memorandum as being "contrary to US national interests, security,
economic prosperity, or sovereignty".
Most
notable among them is the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change (UNFCCC), the parent treaty underpinning all major
international climate agreements.
Trump,
who has thrown the full weight of his domestic policy behind fossil
fuels, has openly scorned the scientific consensus that human activity
is warming the planet, deriding climate science as a "hoax" at the UN's
high-level summit last September.
The
UNFCCC was adopted at the Rio Earth Summit in June 1992 and approved
later that year by the US Senate during George HW Bush's presidency.
The
US Constitution allows presidents to enter treaties "provided
two-thirds of Senators present concur", but it is silent on the process
for withdrawing from them — a legal ambiguity that could invite
challenges.
Trump has already withdrawn from the landmark Paris climate accord since returning to office, just as he did during his first term, a move that former Democratic president Joe Biden later reversed.
Exiting the underlying treaty could introduce additional legal uncertainty around any future US effort to rejoin.
Speaking before the General Assembly in September,
Trump delivered a scathing broadside against the world body founded in
1945 to promote global peace and cooperation in the wake of the Second
World War.
"What
is the purpose of the United Nations?" asked Trump in a wide-ranging
speech, whose litany of complaints extended even to a broken escalator
and teleprompter at the UN's New York headquarters.
The United States skipped the annual UN international climate summit last year for the first time in three decades.
UNFCCC exit 'a whole order of magnitude different'"President Trump's withdrawal of the United States from the bedrock global treaty to tackle climate change is a new low and yet another sign that this authoritarian, anti-science administration is determined to sacrifice people's wellbeing and destabilise global cooperation," Rachel Cleetus of the Union of Concerned Scientists told AFP.
Jean Su, a senior attorney for the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, told AFP: "Pulling out of the UNFCCC is a whole order of magnitude different from pulling out of the Paris Agreement."
"It's
our contention that it's illegal for the President to unilaterally pull
out of a treaty that required two-thirds of the Senate vote," she
continued. "We are looking at legal options to pursue that line of
argument."
"The United States would be
the first country to walk away from the UNFCCC," said Manish Bapna,
president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council. SBS NEWS
