We’re out of the Paris Agreement—again! How Trump can make it stick

On Inauguration Day (January 20, 2025), President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement, the global climate treaty negotiated by the Obama administration in 2015. President Trump also withdrew the US from Paris during his first administration. Although the core policy decision is the same, there are significant differences between the first and second withdrawals.

In brief, the 2025 Inauguration Day withdrawal is more decisive, taking effect immediately rather than two and a half years later. It is more durable, lasting four years instead of three months. In addition, it implicitly questions the constitutional validity of US participation in Paris, which Presidents Obama and Biden purported to join without obtaining the Senate’s advice and consent.

The key document is President Trump’s executive order (EO) 14162, titled “Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements.”

More decisive

During the 2016 presidential race, Trump campaigned on a promise to either “cancel” America’s participation in the Agreement or “renegotiate” it to get a better deal. In the months following Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2017, all manner of special pleaders tried to persuade him that he need not exit Paris to reject the so-called Clean Power Plan and other elements of President Obama’s emission-reduction pledge, dubbed the US “nationally determined contribution” (NDC), which expressly aimed at “deep decarbonization” of the US economy.

Parties peddling the Paris-without-tears message to President Trump included Obama administration officials anxious to preserve their handiwork, State Department brass keen to grow the climate diplomatic corps, and fossil-fuel companies seeking new rationales to subsidize carbon capture and enhanced oil recovery projects.

Since the centerpiece of the Paris Agreement is the provision instructing each party to pledge its “highest possible [climate] ambition” at five-year intervals, it was a bit much to suggest that America would face no blowback if Trump replaced Obama’s NDC with a pledge to “Drill Baby Drill.” But if Trump took the bait, the US would remain in the carbon-haters club, positioning the next POTUS to pick up where Obama left off.

CEI waged a counter messaging campaign during those months. We emphasized that the fundamental problem with Paris was not the specific content of Obama’s pledge but the treaty’s framework and objectives. US membership would legitimize and empower non-stop efforts by EU, NGO, and UN functionaries to name and shame any country—primarily the US—that dares to defend its national interest in developing and using abundant, affordable, and reliable energy from fossil fuels. No sensible person joins a club, or remains in it, to be harangued and snookered into acting against his best interests and better judgment.

Unpersuaded by pro-Paris advocates that the Agreement posed no risks to US competitiveness, jobs, wages, and economic growth, Trump announced on June 1, 2017, in a major Rose Garden address, that the US “will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord.” In short, Trump’s first decision to withdraw from Paris was more than four months in the making.

In stark contrast, the second withdrawal was a day one priority. Trump’s EO 14162 of January 20 directs the US ambassador to the United Nations to “immediately submit formal written notification of the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change” (UNFCCC).

Moreover, the EO states that the US “will consider its withdrawal from the Agreement and any attendant obligations to be effective immediately upon this provision of notification.” That is far more decisive than the first withdrawal, which became effective only one year after the formal notification, pursuant to the Agreement’s Article 28 withdrawal procedure.

Whether the UN climate secretariat will now acknowledge that US withdrawal is effective immediately is apparently of no concern to President Trump. His previous deference to Article 28 was a diplomatic courtesy, not a legally enforceable obligation. It is Trump’s prerogative as president to take us out of the Paris Agreement. Since America is now out, we are no longer subject to any of the Agreement’s provisions, including those dealing with withdrawal.   

More durable

Although President Trump delivered his Rose Garden withdrawal speech in June 2017, the US remained a Paris party until early November 2020. Here’s why. Under the aforementioned Article 28, a Paris party must wait until three years after the Agreement enters into force to submit a notification of withdrawal. That notification, in turn, does not take effect until one year later. Paris entered into force on November 4, 2016 (the date on which at least 55 parties representing at least 55 percent of global emissions joined the pact). Accordingly, the State Department waited until November 4, 2019, to submit the US withdrawal notification, which did not take effect until November 4, 2020.

Alas, November 4 was also the day after Election Day 2020. President Biden quickly reversed Trump’s Paris exit decision. On January 20, 2021, Biden issued a presidential memorandum announcing his “acceptance of the [Paris] Agreement and every article and clause thereof on behalf of the United States.” The State Department transmitted the US acceptance to the UN climate secretariat. The secretariat acknowledged US re-entry into Paris 30 days later, on February 19, 2021.

So, although Trump effectively kept America out of Paris during his first term, the official withdrawal was short-lived. Again, in stark contrast, in Trump’s second term, the US is out of Paris, both effectively and officially, for four years.

When will the seesaw stop?

Over the past nine years the US has been in Paris twice and out of Paris twice. Obama puts us in, Trump takes us out, Biden puts us back in, Trump takes us out again. Is there a way to end the seesaw of dueling presidential pens? Can President Trump move US policy outside the box of highly reversible unilateral executive action?  EO 14162 hints at an answer.

America never really joined

What is most noteworthy about EO 14162 is its implicit questioning of President Obama’s and President Biden’s authority to unilaterally join Paris on behalf of the United States. The EO states: “In recent years, the United States has purported to join international agreements and initiatives that do not reflect our country’s values or our contributions to the pursuit of economic and environmental objectives” (emphasis added).

Alluding to the Agreement’s “climate finance” provisions, the EO further states: “The United States Ambassador to the United Nations, in collaboration with the Secretary of State and Secretary of the Treasury, shall immediately cease or revoke any purported financial commitment made by the United States under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change” (emphasis added).

To say that the US only purported to join the Paris Agreement and only purported to make Paris-related financial commitments indicates doubt as to the validity of those actions. What reasoning supports the view that the US did not really join or commit?  

Constitution solution

Both before and after Trump’s June 2017 Rose Garden speech, CEI championed a constitutional cure for the Paris Agreement. The most definitive way to Paris proof the US economy is to revive the Constitution’s treaty process that Presidents Obama and Biden defied and disregarded.

President Obama rightly called the Paris Agreement the “most ambitious climate change agreement in history.” Each party’s obligation to pledge an NDC reflecting its “highest possible ambition,” every five years, makes Paris more ambitious than either the original 1992 UNFCCC or the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, both of which are indisputably treaties subject to the Constitution’s advice and consent process.

Nor is that all. When we consider that the climate system embraces the Earth’s oceans, land masses, and atmosphere, and that Paris aims to redirect capital flows and transform energy policy and infrastructure across the globe, the Agreement is the most ambitious environmental treaty in history.

Yet President Obama claimed he could “accept” (a.k.a. ratify) the Paris Agreement on his sole authority as chief executive—as if Paris were in the same league with bilateral executive agreements the Bush administration negotiated with Congo, Niger, and Ethiopia to promote environmental education in primary and secondary schools.

A terminological confusion, exploited by Presidents Obama and Biden, arises over the word “treaty.” In international diplomacy, “treaty” is a synonym for agreement, pact, accord, etc. In the US Constitution, “treaty” has a particular meaning—a pact or agreement of sufficient importance to warrant review by the Senate.

Thus, the Obama administration negotiated Paris as an “Agreement” to avoid triggering demands for constitutional review by the US Senate. A cynical word game that, if allowed to stand, could make hash of a critical constitutional check and balance. As if all a president must do to join a high cost, high risk treaty is call it by another name.

The Framers considered treaty-making a big deal, involving national interests both “momentous and delicate” (Federalist 75). Under Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution, the president may appoint ambassadors, other officers of the United States, and even Supreme Court justices with the concurrence of a simple majority in the Senate. Adopting a treaty requires a higher level of consent, one reflecting a broad consensus: “The President . . . shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur.”

The Paris Agreement is a treaty for US constitutional purposes by virtue of its costs and risks to the nation, dependence on subsequent legislation by Congress, potential to affect state laws, past US practice regarding similar agreements, and other common-sense criteria for determining whether an agreement warrants the Senate’s advice and consent.

Paris-proofing the future

EO 14162 additionally directs the US Ambassador to the United Nations, in collaboration with the Secretary of State and Secretary of the Treasury to certify a report that “describes in detail any further action required to achieve the policy objectives set forth in section 2 of this order.” The main objective of section 2 is “to put the interests of the United States and the American people first in the development and negotiation of any international agreements with the potential to damage or stifle the American economy.”

The most powerful “further action” the president could take, at such time as he considers prudent, would be to submit Paris to the Senate for its constitutional review, where it would almost surely fail to win the requisite support of “two-thirds of the Senators present.”

From that moment on, any future chief executive who purports to rejoin Paris—or join any comparably consequential environmental treaty—without first obtaining the Senate’s advice and consent would encounter pushback from a public alert to the difference between constitutional treatymaking and cynical attempts to evade it.

Equally important, forcing the Senate to relearn how to exercise its shared power in treaty making should make at least some members of that body bolder and smarter the next time a chief executive purports, on his sole authority, to lock America into global policy schemes detrimental to political accountability and the liberties and prosperity of the American people.