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 on Friday.
Trump promoted his announcement Wednesday night on Twitter, after a day in which US allies around the world sounded alarms about the likely consequences of a US withdrawal. Trump himself kept everyone in suspense, saying he was still listening to "a lot of people both ways".
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.
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 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 US exit would deal a blow to the fight against global warming as well as to worldwide US leadership.
That fight has played out within Trump's administration.
Trump on Wednesday met 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 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.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said Wednesday in Alaska that he had "yet to read what the actual Paris Agreement is," and would have to read it before weighing in.
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 US 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 US has agreed to reduce its emissions by 2025 to 26 percent to 28 percent of 2005 levels — about 1.6 billion tons.
"Paris more than anything is a symbol," said Nigel Purvis, who directed U.S. climate diplomacy during the Bill Clinton and George W Bush administrations.
Another option, said University of California, Berkeley climate scientist Zeke Hausfather, would be for Trump to withdraw from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the treaty on which the Paris accord was based, which would take only a year.
News of Trump's expected decision drew swift reaction from the United Nations. The organization's main Twitter page quoted Secretary-General Antonio Guterres as saying, "Climate change is undeniable. Climate change is unstoppable. Climate solutions provide opportunities that are unmatchable."
The Sierra Club's executive director, Michael Brune, called the expected move a "historic mistake which our grandchildren will look back on with stunned dismay at how a world leader could be so divorced from reality and morality."
Trump claimed before taking office that climate change was a "hoax" created by the Chinese to hurt the US economy, an assertion that stands in defiance of broad scientific consensus. He has spent his first months in office working to delay and roll back federal regulations limiting greenhouse gas emissions while pledging to revive long-struggling US coal mines.
But Cohn, Trump's chief White House economic adviser, told reporters during the trip abroad that the president's views on climate change were "evolving" following the discussions with European leaders.
Still, Cohn said that the carbon levels agreed to by the prior administration "would be highly crippling to the US economic growth," and if the president had to choose between limiting carbon and economic growth, "growing our economy is going to win." Supporters of the deal say it's not an either-or choice.
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