President Donald Trump has spent months trying to weaken global institutions at the center of tackling climate change.
But as he steps up to the United Nations’ dais Tuesday, he still hasn’t announced his plans for perhaps the most pivotal climate pact of all.
The annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly in New York comes more than a month after Trump’s deadline for his State Department to identify international organizations and agreements that the U.S. should quit, defund or overhaul. Some of his allies hope he will follow through by pulling out of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, a move that could fundamentally reshape international efforts to counter the rise of planet-warming greenhouse gases.
The 1992 treaty, negotiated during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, serves as the international structure for efforts by the U.S. and 197 other countries to slow the rise of greenhouse gases. It’s also the underlying framework for the 2015 Paris climate agreement, which Trump moved to abandon on his first day in office.
The U.N. framework is rare among global climate pacts because the U.S. Senate ratified it, something that requires a two-thirds supermajority. That could complicate any future president’s efforts to rejoin the treaty if Trump exits.
In contrast, the Paris Agreement was designed not to require Senate approval, which means any U.S. president can exit or rejoin it on their whim.
“There is zero benefit to remaining in the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change,” Steven Groves, a former Trump official who’s now at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said in an email. “Leaving the Convention would prevent future Democrat administrations from circumventing Senate advice and consent on treaties, as President [Barack] Obama did with the Paris Agreement.”
The White House did not answer questions about whether the U.S. would withdraw from the UNFCCC or whether it was up for discussion. But spokesperson Davis Ingle said Trump would use his speech to lay out a vision “for a safe, prosperous, peaceful America and the world.”
“Under President Trump’s leadership, our country is strong again, which has made the entire globe more stable,” Ingle said. “In only eight months, the President has brokered seven peace deals, secured historic trade deals and investments, and strengthened alliances across the world.”
Groves, who served as chief of staff to Nikki Haley when she was ambassador to the U.N., said he doesn’t think Trump would use his U.N. speech to withdraw from the climate treaty. Such a move would be “trivial” compared with Trump’s focus on trade, investment and peace deals, Groves said.
‘Contrary to American interests’
Trump asked his Cabinet in February to report to him in August with recommendations on whether to pull out of any international organizations or agreements that go against the United States’ national interest. Since then, his administration has dissolved the State Department office responsible for leading U.S. climate negotiations, dismembered a program that tracks the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions and thwarted clean energy policies in favor of expanding oil, gas and coal. Those actions are antithetical to the goals of the U.N. climate framework.
A high-profile departure from the global framework on climate change would be a marked escalation of Trump’s moves to divorce the U.S. from the nearly unanimous sentiment globally that climate change poses economic and natural upheaval. It would also be the most enduring step that Trump has taken so far, his allies argue.
The UNFCCC’s approval by then-President Bush and a Democratic-controlled Senate was one of the strongest commitments made by America to the climate fight. The United States’ connection to the Paris Agreement is more tenuous. Obama entered into partnership with that pact through an executive action, a move that has continued to irk conservatives.
If Trump does withdraw from the framework, it would raise questions about whether the U.S. could reenter the UNFCCC in the future.
Some legal experts say the Senate’s consent does not operate in perpetuity after the U.S. has left a treaty. Others argue that if a president can unilaterally leave a treaty that has earned support from two-thirds of the Senate, a future president could rejoin it without a new vote.
“Otherwise, you’re just handing this huge amount of power to a president to forever cancel the act of the Senate,” said Jean Galbraith, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has written about treaties.
Regardless of the legal pathway, Galbraith said withdrawing from the treaty could pitch the global effort to grapple with rising temperatures into turmoil.
“First, it takes the United States out of the main forum for a crucial conversation about how to save our planet,” she said. “And second, it is a kind of potential path to a lot of instability going forward.”
Whether the review over quitting international forums has risen to Trump’s attention is unclear.
Eugene Chen, a senior fellow at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation, said the U.S. could reshape global plans on energy and environment even if Trump decides against quitting the climate framework. Staying in the treaty, he said, could “have the benefits of being able to influence discussions and gum up the works if they so choose.”
Brett Schaefer, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who produced his own assessment of which organizations he thinks the U.S. should leave, argued that Trump should withdraw from the UNFCCC in part because the U.S. is not behind the more substantive agreements it underpins, including the Paris Agreement.
“If the United States is not going to support the prescriptive agreements, that casts questions over whether we should be participating in that process,” he said.
The review that Trump ordered has made its way through the State Department, according to two former officials who were asked for input during the process about how various organizations and treaties have benefited the United States and requested anonymity to avoid retribution. That feedback fed into a spreadsheet containing the names of treaties and institutions that included questions about their costs and benefits and asked for quantitative rankings.
It’s unclear where the review stands now. Trump’s February executive order instructed Secretary of State Marco Rubio to deliver it to the White House by early August.
A State Department spokesperson declined to answer detailed questions about the status of the review.
“President Trump ordered a review of U.S. participation in and funding for international organizations to ensure U.S. investments in international organizations are not contrary to American interests,” the spokesperson said in an email.
The executive order also called for input from the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Mike Waltz, who was confirmed for the position Friday, indicated during his Senate hearing that he believes the U.S. is spending too much attention and money on U.N. initiatives, including on climate change.
“It’s quite a list,” Waltz said, adding, “I think it is incumbent on this administration to say, ‘What’s it doing?’”
