WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump is nearing a final decision on whether to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, with indications that he is leaning toward an exit.
The matter has deeply divided the administration for months. Daughter and adviser Ivanka Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson have urged the president to remain in the deal, and White House strategist Stephen Bannon and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt have been pushing for a withdrawal.
A withdrawal would put the United States in the same camp as Nicaragua and Syria: a tiny group of countries refusing to participate in the almost universally supported Paris climate-change agreement.
Trump added to the intense speculation about the future of the agreement Wednesday morning, tweeting that his decision will be announced "over the next few days."
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Later in the day, he again stoked the uncertainty during a brief appearance with Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc at the White House. He told members of the White House press pool that he would have a decision about the Paris agreement "very soon."
"I'm hearing from a lot of people, both ways," he said.
The White House signaled that Trump was likely to announce an exit from the Paris accord, and in the evening Wednesday, he tweeted that he would announce his decision this afternoon in the White House Rose Garden.
More than 190 nations agreed to the accord in December 2015 in Paris, and 147 have since formally ratified or otherwise joined it, including the United States -- representing more than 80 percent of the world's greenhouse-gas emissions.
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A U.S. withdrawal would remove the world's second-largest emitter and nearly 18 percent of the globe's present-day emissions from the agreement, presenting a severe challenge to its structure and raising questions about whether it would weaken the commitments of other nations.
Trump has already, through executive orders, moved to roll back key policies from President Barack Obama's era, notably the EPA's Clean Power Plan, that constituted a key part of the United States' Paris promise to reduce its emissions 26 percent to 28 percent below their 2005 levels by 2025.
As of 2015, emissions were 12 percent lower, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The Paris decision has deeply divided the administration, with internationalists, such as Tillerson, arguing that it would be beneficial to the United States to remain part of negotiations and international meetings relating to the agreement, as a matter of leverage and influence.
Trump also faced considerable pressure to hold to the deal during visits with European leaders and Pope Francis on his recent trip abroad.
Conservatives, such as Pruitt, have argued that the agreement is not fair to the United States and that staying in it would be used as a legal tool by environmental groups seeking to fight Trump environmental policies.
Trump has long been lobbied by people on both sides of the issue, inside and outside the White House. A broad range of advocates, from former Vice President Al Gore to Pope Francis to scores of companies -- including Exxon, Chevron and BP -- have urged Trump to allow the United States to remain part of the global accord.
But other forces have leaned on him to exit the agreement.
Experts at the influential Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, have argued that the Paris agreement should be viewed as a treaty and submitted to the Senate for approval. Trump also has cited the organization's research concluding that remaining in the Paris accord would inflict economic harm on the United States in return for little environmental benefit -- a conclusion environmental groups insist is flawed.
In addition, a group of 22 Republican senators -- a group that included Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell -- wrote to Trump urging him to exit the Paris accord.
"Because of existing provisions within the Clean Air Act and others embedded in the Paris Agreement, remaining in it would subject the United States to significant litigation risk that could upend your Administration's ability to fulfill its goal of rescinding the Clean Power Plan," the group wrote. "Accordingly, we strongly encourage you to make a clean break from the Paris Agreement."
Nearly 200 nations, including the United States under the Obama administration, agreed in 2015 to voluntarily reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions to combat climate change.
The U.S. is the world's second-largest emitter of carbon, following China.
'Not how it works'
Reactions to the prospect of Trump withdrawing from international accord came quickly Wednesday, even as the president himself declined to official announce his decision.
The president of the European Commission, which is the European Union's executive body, on Wednesday said it was the "duty of Europe" to stand up to the U.S. if Trump decides to pull out of the Paris accord.
Jean-Claude Juncker went on to say that leaders of the Group of Seven major industrial nations "tried to explain this in clear, simple sentences to Mr. Trump" at a recent summit in Italy.
Juncker said, "If the U.S. president pulls out of the Paris agreement, and he will in the next days or hours, then it is Europe's duty to say that that is not how it works."
A senior European Union official said the EU and China would reaffirm their commitment to the pact regardless of what Trump did, and would spell out, during talks Friday in Brussels, how they would meet their obligations. The official, who is involved in preparing the meeting between EU officials and China's premier, was not authorized to speak publicly and discussed the matter on condition of anonymity because the meeting statement was not finalized.
"The EU and China are joining forces to forge ahead on the implementation of the Paris Agreement and accelerate the global transition to clean energy," EU climate commissioner Miguel Arias Canete said about the upcoming EU-China summit, stressing they remain committed to Paris.
The United Nations' 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."
Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, tweeted that if Trump does leave the accord, he would have "no choice but to depart councils" on which he has advised the president in the past. Musk has been part of Trump's White House manufacturing-jobs initiative.
"Withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement would be a grave mistake," Harold Wimmer, president of the American Lung Association, said in a statement. "Everyone deserves to breathe air that will not make them sick or cause them to die prematurely. We need to cooperate globally to address climate change if we want to continue to reduce air pollution and protect public health."
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."
Even on Capitol Hill, some Democrats began to condemn the move, before it had formally happened. Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., said that leaving the Paris agreement would amount to an "abdication" of U.S. values.
"This would be yet another example of President Trump's 'Putting America Last' agenda -- last in innovation, last in science, and last in international leadership," Bennet said in a statement. "The Paris agreement has wide support from global oil and gas companies to coal generators in our Western states. We should not be moving backwards as the rest of the world races forward to compete in the clean energy industry."
Others cheered the notion that Trump might soon kill the climate agreement.
"For far too long the Obama Administration allowed foreign governments and alarmist environmentalists to dictate, not only climate change policy, but worse our nation's economic policy," David McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth, a conservative political action group, said in a statement. "President Trump's decision sends a strong message to the environmentalist movement: no longer will the United States be strong armed by their scare tactics intended to harm our economy and inhibit economic growth."
Trump claimed before taking office that climate change was a "hoax" created by the Chinese to hurt the U.S. economy.
But Trump's chief White House economic adviser, Gary Cohn, told reporters during the trip abroad that Trump's views on climate change were "evolving" after the president's discussions with European leaders.
The Paris accord is flexible in the sense that it does not mandate that any nation achieve any particular level of emissions cuts. Rather, every nation under the agreement pledges to do the best it can and to participate in a process in which nations will regularly increase their ambitions over time.
The ultimate goal of the Paris agreement is to hold the warming of the planet to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius -- about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit -- of warming above the temperatures found in the preindustrial times of the late 1800s. The earth is already about 1 degree Celsius warmer than it was in that era, scientists have determined, and current and near future emissions seem quite likely to take the planet past 1.5 degrees Celsius in the coming decades.
Recent research has highlighted that above 2 degrees, major threats could ensue for Earth's systems ranging from coral reefs to the planet's vast ice sheets.
According to the agreement, a party that has fully joined the accord, as the United States has, cannot formally withdraw for three years after the agreement has entered into force -- and that is then capped by an extra year-long waiting period. Under those rules, Trump could not completely force a U.S. exit from the agreement until the waning days of his term.
Information for this article was contributed by Chris Mooney, Brady Dennis and Philip Rucker of The Washington Post and by Julie Pace, Catherine Lucey, Jill Colvin and Michael Biesecker and Lorne Cook of The Associated Press.
A Section on 06/01/2017