Trump to announce decision on Paris climate pact today

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

President Donald Trump says he will announce his decision on whether to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord during a Rose Garden event today.

Trump promoted his announcement Wednesday night on Twitter, after a day in which U.S. allies around the world sounded alarms about the likely consequences of a U.S. withdrawal.

Trump himself kept everyone in suspense, saying he was still listening to “a lot of people both ways.”

The White House signaled that Trump was likely to decide on exiting the global pact – fulfilling one of his principal campaign pledges – though top aides were deeply divided. And the final decision may not be entirely clear-cut: Aides were still deliberating on “caveats in the language,” one official said.

Everyone cautioned that no decision was final until Trump announced it. The president has been known to change his thinking on major decisions and tends to seek counsel from both inside and outside advisers, many with differing agendas, until the last minute.

Abandoning the pact would isolate the U.S. from a raft of international allies who spent years negotiating the 2015 agreement to fight global warming and pollution by reducing carbon emissions in nearly 200 nations. While traveling abroad last week, Trump was repeatedly pressed to stay in the deal by European leaders and the Vatican. Withdrawing would leave the United States aligned only with Russia among the world’s industrialized economies.

U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan of Howland, D-13th, called leaving the agreement a “disastrous decision” that will hurt communities in Ohio “where the transition to a cleaner, more sustainable energy economy could bring jobs back to our communities.”

“It hurts our planet by once again continuing to ignore the perils of global climate change,” Ryan said in a statement.

U.S. Rep. Bill Johnson of Marietta, R-6th, believes that under the agreement, communities and industries dependent on fossil fuels will be harmed since other countries are allowed to increase their coal consumption.

“This nonbinding pact represents an “America second” strategy, and I hope the president withdraws from this agreement,” Johnson said in a statement sent to The Vindicator.

U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Cleveland, said in a statement, “Refusing to act on climate change means allowing harmful algal blooms on Lake Erie to threaten clean drinking water and hurt local tourism jobs. Ohio is already creating jobs manufacturing fuel-efficient cars, energy-efficient appliances, and renewable energy, and leaving this agreement would pull this rug out from Ohio’s work to create jobs in this growing sector.”

U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, a Republican from the Cincinnati area, has taken on a leadership role in bipartisan efforts to protect the environment, Portman’s spokesman Kevin Smith said.

“He has concerns about this accord because of its potential impact on job creation here in the U.S., and he will closely review any decision the president makes on this issue,” Smith said in a statement sent to The Vindicator.

American corporate leaders have also appealed to the businessman-turned-president to stay. They include Apple, Google and Walmart. Even fossil fuel companies such as Exxon Mobil, BP and Shell say the United States should abide by the deal.

Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama enacted the deal without U.S. Senate ratification. A formal withdrawal would take years, experts say, a situation that led the president of the European Commission to speak dismissively of Trump on Wednesday.

Trump doesn’t “comprehensively understand” the terms of the accord, though European leaders tried to explain the process for withdrawing to him “in clear, simple sentences” during summit meetings last week, Jean-Claude Juncker said in Berlin. “It looks like that attempt failed,” Juncker said. “This notion, ‘I am Trump, I am American, America first and I am getting out,’ that is not going to happen.”

Some of Trump’s aides have been searching for a middle ground – perhaps by renegotiating the terms of the agreement – in an effort to thread the needle between his base of supporters who oppose the deal and those warning that a U.S. exit would deal a blow to the fight against global warming as well as to worldwide U.S. leadership.

That fight has played out within Trump’s administration in an extraordinarily public deliberation.

Trump met Wednesday with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who has favored remaining in the agreement. Chief strategist Steve Bannon supports an exit, as does Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt.

Trump’s chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, has discussed the possibility of changing the U.S. carbon reduction targets instead of pulling out of the deal completely. Senior adviser Jared Kushner generally thinks the deal is bad but still would like to see if emissions targets can be changed.

Trump’s influential daughter Ivanka Trump’s preference is to stay, but she has made it a priority to establish a review process so her father would hear from all sides, said a senior administration official. Like the other officials, that person was not authorized to describe the private discussions by name and spoke only on condition of anonymity.

Trump has several options, climate experts said.

The emissions goals are voluntary with no real consequences for countries that fail to meet them. That means the U.S. could stay in the accord and choose not to hit its goals or stay in the pact but adjust its targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S. has agreed to reduce its emissions by 2025 to 26 percent to 28 percent of 2005 levels – about 1.6 billion tons.