United States President Donald Trump is withdrawing the US from a foundational climate treaty and the world's leading global warming assessment body, as part of a sweeping exit from the United Nations system, the White House announced on Wednesday.
A total of 66 international organisations — comprised of "35 non-United Nations (UN) organizations and 31 UN entities" — were named in a White House memorandum as being "contrary to US national interests, security, economic prosperity, or sovereignty".
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" at the UN's high-level summit last September.
The UNFCCC was adopted at the Rio Earth Summit in June 1992 and approved later that year by the US Senate during George HW 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 challenges.
Trump has already withdrawn from the landmark Paris climate accord since returning to office, just as he did during his first term, a move that former Democratic president Joe Biden later reversed.
Exiting the underlying treaty could introduce additional legal uncertainty around any future US effort to rejoin.
Speaking before the General Assembly in September, Trump delivered a scathing broadside against the world body founded in 1945 to promote global peace and cooperation in the wake of the Second World War.
"What is the purpose of the United Nations?" asked Trump in a wide-ranging speech, whose litany of complaints extended even to a broken escalator and teleprompter at the UN's New York headquarters.
The United States skipped the annual UN international climate summit last year for the first time in three decades.
UNFCCC exit 'a whole order of magnitude different'
"President Trump's withdrawal of the United States from the bedrock global treaty to tackle climate change is a new low and yet another sign that this authoritarian, anti-science administration is determined to sacrifice people's wellbeing and destabilise global cooperation," Rachel Cleetus of the Union of Concerned Scientists told AFP.
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 United States would be the first country to walk away from the UNFCCC," said Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
"Every other nation is a member, in part because they recognise that even beyond the moral imperative of addressing climate change, having a seat at the table in those negotiations represents an ability to shape massive economic policy and opportunity," said Bapna.
California Governor Gavin Newsom, an outspoken critic of Trump who is widely seen as a presidential contender, said in a statement: "Our brainless president is surrendering America's leadership on the world stage and weakening our ability to compete in the economy of the future — creating a leadership vacuum that China is already exploiting."
Organisations seeking to 'constrain American sovereignty, Rubio claims
The memo also directs the US to withdraw from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body responsible for assessing climate science, alongside other climate-related organisations including the International Renewable Energy Agency, UN Oceans and UN Water.
As in his first term, Trump has also withdrawn the US from UNESCO — the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization — which the country had rejoined under Biden.
Trump has likewise pulled the US out of the World Health Organization and sharply reduced foreign aid, slashing funding for numerous UN agencies and forcing them to scale back operations on the ground, including the High Commissioner for Refugees and the World Food Programme.
Other prominent bodies named in the memo include the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), which works on sexual and reproductive health and rights, and the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), which focuses on trade, investment and development.
"For United Nations entities, withdrawal means ceasing participation in or funding to those entities to the extent permitted by law," reads the memo. Trump has already largely slashed voluntary funding to most UN agencies.
"These withdrawals will end American taxpayer funding and involvement in entities that advance globalist agendas over US priorities, or that address important issues inefficiently or ineffectively such that US taxpayer dollars are best allocated in other ways to support the relevant missions," the White House's statement read.
US secretary of state Marco Rubio said the organisations were driven by "progressive ideology" and were actively seeking to "constrain American sovereignty".
"From DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] mandates to 'gender equity' campaigns to climate orthodoxy, many international organizations now serve a globalist project," he said in a statement.
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