Standing in the White House Rose Garden, President Donald Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, breaking with nearly every nation in the world on one of the most significant international efforts to confront climate change.
Trump framed the decision as another step in his “America First” agenda, arguing that the agreement placed an unfair economic burden on American workers and businesses.
“The United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord,” Trump announced, while saying his administration would attempt to negotiate either new terms for American participation or an entirely different agreement.
The Paris Agreement had been negotiated in 2015 and brought countries around the world together under a framework designed to limit greenhouse-gas emissions and slow the rise in global temperatures. At the time of Trump's announcement, 195 parties had signed the agreement.
Trump nevertheless portrayed the agreement as fundamentally stacked against the United States.
He argued that remaining in the accord could eliminate millions of American jobs, damage manufacturing and transfer wealth from the United States to other countries. He also suggested that countries such as China and India were being permitted to expand their use of coal while American industry faced severe restrictions.
Those arguments quickly came under scrutiny.
The Paris Agreement did not dictate which power plants individual countries could construct. Instead, participating nations established their own emissions-reduction commitments. The United States had pledged to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.
Trump's suggestion that he could simply renegotiate the agreement also encountered immediate resistance. The United Nations climate secretariat responded that the agreement had been negotiated collectively and could not simply be rewritten at the request of one participating country.
The International Fallout
The reaction from America's allies was swift.
French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni issued a joint statement expressing regret over Trump's decision and rejecting his suggestion that the agreement could simply be renegotiated.
The three leaders declared their continued commitment to implementing the agreement and described the momentum behind it as irreversible.
Macron went further in a televised address, arguing that there was no alternative planet on which humanity could escape the consequences of climate change.
The response demonstrated a broader diplomatic problem created by Trump's decision.
For decades, the United States had played a central role in constructing international agreements and persuading other nations to participate in them. Now American allies were publicly declaring that they intended to continue an international initiative without Washington.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change also expressed regret over the withdrawal while making clear that the remaining participants intended to continue implementing the agreement.
Rather than causing the Paris framework to collapse, Trump's announcement prompted other governments to publicly reaffirm it.
A Rebellion at Home
The response inside the United States was equally significant.
Within hours of Trump's announcement, California Governor Jerry Brown, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Washington Governor Jay Inslee announced the creation of the United States Climate Alliance.
The coalition committed participating states to continuing efforts toward the emissions goals established under the Paris Agreement despite the federal government's withdrawal.
It represented an unusual development in American climate policy: governors were effectively telling the international community that the position of the White House did not necessarily represent the policies being pursued throughout the rest of the country.
Cities soon joined the effort.
Mayors across the United States pledged to continue pursuing emissions reductions, renewable-energy programs and other policies consistent with the goals of the Paris Agreement.
Businesses and universities joined as well.
Just days after Trump's announcement, hundreds of governors, mayors, state officials, corporate executives and other leaders backed a declaration known as “We Are Still In.”
Their message to the international community was straightforward: even if the federal government was abandoning the Paris framework, significant parts of the United States were not.
The withdrawal therefore produced something Trump almost certainly had not intended.
Instead of ending American participation in climate efforts, it fractured it.
The federal government moved in one direction while states, cities, universities and corporations organized themselves to move in another.
America Steps Away From the Table
There was also an important detail that received less attention amid the political spectacle in the Rose Garden: the United States could not leave immediately.
Under the agreement's rules, formal withdrawal could not begin until November 2019 and would not become effective until one year later. The Trump administration ultimately submitted its official withdrawal notification in November 2019.
But politically, America's departure began on June 1, 2017.
The announcement became one of the clearest early examples of Trump's approach to international institutions and agreements. When he believed an existing arrangement disadvantaged the United States, he was willing to challenge it or leave it—even when America's closest allies wanted Washington to remain.
The immediate aftermath also demonstrated the limits of presidential power over a country as economically and politically decentralized as the United States.
Trump could withdraw the federal government from Paris.
He could not order California, New York, Washington or hundreds of American cities and companies to abandon their own climate policies.
And internationally, he could remove the United States from the agreement, but he could not persuade the other major participants to follow.
Instead, America's traditional allies publicly recommitted themselves to Paris while governors, mayors and businesses inside the United States began building their own parallel climate coalition.
The Rose Garden announcement was intended to demonstrate that the United States would no longer accept an international agreement Trump considered unfair.
Its immediate consequence was something broader: America's federal government stepped away from the international climate coalition while much of that coalition—including parts of America itself—decided to continue without it.