WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump's decision to withdraw the United States from a bedrock climate treaty was slammed on Thursday by the EU, which vowed to keep tackling the crisis with other nations.
The White House flagged the US exit from 66 global organisations and treaties — roughly half affiliated with the United Nations — it identified as "contrary to the interests of the United States."
Most notable among them is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the parent treaty underpinning all major international climate agreements.
The treaty adopted in 1992 is a global pact by nations to cooperate to drive down planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change.
European Union climate chief Wopke Hoekstra said the UNFCCC "underpins global climate action" and brings nations together in the collective fight against the crisis.
"The decision by the world's largest economy and second-largest emitter to retreat from it is regrettable and unfortunate," Hoekstra said in a post on LinkedIn.
"We will unequivocally continue to support international climate research, as the foundation of our understanding and work. We will also continue to work on international climate cooperation."
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."
His administration sent no representative to the most recent UN climate summit in Brazil in November, which is held every year under the auspices of the UNFCCC.
Teresa Ribera, the EU's vice-president for the clean transition, said the Trump administration "doesn't care" about the environment, health or the suffering of people.
The UNFCCC was adopted at the Rio Earth Summit in June 1992 and approved later that year by the US Senate during George H W Bush's presidency.
"The US withdrawal from the UN climate framework is a heavy blow to global climate action, fracturing hard-won consensus," Li Shuo, a climate expert at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said.
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 court challenges.
Trump has already withdrawn from the landmark Paris climate accord since returning to office, just as he did during his first term from 2017-2021 in a move later reversed by his successor, Democratic president Joe Biden.
Exiting the underlying treaty could introduce additional legal uncertainty around any future US effort to rejoin.
Jean Su, a senior attorney for the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, said: "Pulling out of the UNFCCC is a whole order of magnitude different from pulling out of the Paris Agreement." — AFP
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