Episode Details

President Donald Trump's withdrawal from the entire United Nations climate-fighting apparatus takes America's environmental isolation to another level and is likely to damage both the United States and the world as the planet flirts with ecological tipping points, experts say. Leaders from around the world say the United States will be left behind as more than 190 other nations join in what they call a blossoming green economy that is transitioning from polluting coal, oil, and gas to cleaner and cheaper solar, wind, and other renewable energies. The action on January 7 starts the process to pull the U.S. out of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It's the main way nations negotiate, monitor, and enforce agreements to curb worsening climate change, and is a bigger step than Trump's 2017 and 2025 withdrawals from the bedrock 2015 Paris Agreement aimed at limiting warming. The framework was negotiated in Brazil in 1992, championed by Republican U.S. President George H.W. Bush, and ratified unanimously by the U.S. Senate. It's what Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden used to justify signing and reactivating the Paris deal without needing Senate approval. The Trump administration also withdrew from a United Nations climate science panel, a biodiversity-saving effort, and the Green Climate Fund to help poor nations, as well as many other international collaborations. "It is a more serious step, definitely. The world loses a lot, and it is very damaging," said Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. "The U.S. turns its back against science, against global collaboration, against any kind of action on climate change. So, yes, in that sense, it's more fundamental and more damaging" than earlier efforts. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in announcing the U.S. withdrawal, said the Trump administration "has found these institutions to be redundant in their scope, mismanaged, unnecessary, wasteful, poorly run, captured by the interests of actors advancing their own agendas contrary to our own, or a threat to our nation's sovereignty, freedoms, and general prosperity." This article was provided by The Associated Press.