WASHINGTON — The U.S. will pull out of the Paris accord on global warming, President Donald Trump announced Thursday, offering a statement of unabashed nationalism as he turned away from a global leadership role in the fight against climate change.
“It is time to put Youngstown, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania … ahead of Paris, France,” Trump declared to an audience of administration officials and supporters in the White House Rose Garden.
The climate agreement would “undermine our economy, hamstring our workers, weaken our sovereignty … and put us at a permanent disadvantage to the other countries of the world,” he said. “It is time to exit Paris.”
The move will not fully take effect for four years, under the terms of the agreement. During that time, Trump said, he hopes to negotiate a new agreement “on terms that are fair to the United States.”
That’s not likely to be easy. In advance of the announcement, world leaders lobbied Trump heavily to stay in the agreement, and repeatedly announced their intentions to stick with the terms that were agreed to in Paris in 2015 after years of laborious negotiations.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, responding to Trump, said she regretted the U.S. decision and would continue to work to “save our earth.”
Trump lashed out at foreign leaders in his statement, saying they supported the agreement because it was a “massive redistribution of United States wealth to other countries.”
The climate deal was “less about the climate and more about other countries gaining a financial advantage over the United States,” he said, adding that “we don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us anymore, and they won’t be.”
Trump said the accord would allow China, India and other major polluters to continue emitting greenhouse gases while imposing unfair burdens on the U.S., and would cost the U.S. millions of jobs.
Supporters of the agreement, which include many Republican business leaders as well as environmental activists, say just the opposite — that steps to combat global warming would help the U.S. economy by building up new industries, especially solar and wind power.
The agreement, which almost every country in the world has joined, is designed to cut emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in order to keep temperatures from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius compared with pre-industrial levels. That’s the point at which climate scientists warn the impact of climate change worldwide would be severe.
How much the U.S. leaving the accord will impede achievement of that goal remains to be seen. Technological and economic changes have steadily made solar and wind power less expensive, and the U.S. was already on a path to meet many of the commitments made in Paris, amid the boom in electricity from natural gas and the plunge in prices for solar and wind power.
“The nations that remain in the Paris Agreement will be the nations that reap the benefits in jobs and industries created,” former President Barack Obama said in a statement responding to Trump’s announcement.
“But even in the absence of American leadership; even as this administration joins a small handful of nations that reject the future; I’m confident that our states, cities and businesses will step up and do even more to lead the way, and help protect for future generations the one planet we’ve got,” he said.
When the agreement was signed, Obama had hailed it as one of his major accomplishments.
Despite the trends in technology, the departure of the world’s biggest economy is certain to disrupt international plans to combat global warming. The U.S. will now join the only two other nations that refused to sign on, Syria and Nicaragua. The Central American nation complained that the accord wasn’t stringent enough.
The move may also harm the growing U.S. clean-energy industry, which may now see China and Europe take the lead in developing advanced technologies.
Outside economists have said the cost to the U.S. of staying in the accord would have been minimal, as it allowed flexibility to adjust targets. Keeping the treaty intact would not have prevented the administration from rolling back some of Obama’s ambitious domestic climate programs, they said.
But some conservatives warned that environmental activists could use the agreement as a way to block the administration from its efforts to dismantle Obama’s policies.