Climate Change Weekly # 535 — Paris Climate Treaty Is Going Down
By H. Sterling Burnett
Published February 21, 2025
Paris Climate Treaty Is Going Down
With history as a guide and two months to prepare for the announcement, there was relatively little wailing and gnashing of teeth when President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement (for the second time; the lamentations were much greater in 2017) on his first day back in office. Despite efforts by politicos and influentials within the United States and internationally to encourage Trump to stay in the Paris agreement, the writing was on the wall.
Trump has repeatedly called climate change a hoax and the green new deal a scam. Trump’s words might indicate his assessment of the nefarious shenanigans that climate researchers have been caught undertaking over the years and the half-truths and falsehoods those climate researchers have peddled in the effort to gain more funding for themselves and influence political action. Alternatively, Trump’s statements might have been signaling his deft understanding that the Paris agreement took America as a sucker and were an attempt to force the United States and developed nations to deindustrialize while our geopolitical and economic rivals, especially China, India, and Russia, continue developing using fossil fuels. Regardless of his motives, Trump said he’d pull the United States out of the Paris agreement (again!), and he did. I hope it will stick this time.
Trump went even farther, however, signing the Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements EO. This order rescinded America’s support for every climate agreement subsequent to the initial U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change treaty the United States joined through Senate ratification in October 1992. These include, for example, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (1997), the 2001 Adaptation Fund (2001), the 2007 Bali Action Plan, the 2009 Copenhagen Accord, the 2013 Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage (2013), the Lima-Paris Action Agenda (2014), and the 2024 New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance.
https://heartland.org/opinion/climate-change-weekly-535-paris-climate-treaty-is-going-down/
