President Donald Trump is withdrawing the United States from a foundational climate treaty as part of a sweeping exit from collective global action, the White House announced Wednesday.
A total of 66 global organizations and treaties — roughly half affiliated with the United Nations — were listed in a White House memorandum 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.
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.”
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 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Trump has already withdrawn from the landmark Paris climate accord since returning to office, just as he did during his first term from 2017–2021 in a move later reversed by his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.
But Jean Su, a senior attorney for the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity, told AFP: “Pulling out of the UNFCCC is a whole order of magnitude different from pulling out of the Paris Agreement.”
“It’s our contention that it’s illegal for the President to unilaterally pull out of a treaty that required two thirds of the Senate vote,” she continued. “We are looking at legal options to pursue that line of argument.”
“The US withdrawal from the UN climate framework is a heavy blow to global climate action, fracturing hard-won consensus,” Li Shuo of the Asia Society Policy Institute told AFP.
