President Donald Trump has formally withdrawn the United States from the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This was the right thing to do. While climate change is real and presents challenges, it is milder than the fantastical nightmare scenarios of green activists, which have not come remotely close to being true, whereas carbon emission reduction policies have already caused massive damage, killed millions of people, and cost trillions of dollars.
The UNFCCC is the foundational treaty of modern global climate politics. Negotiated in the early 1990s and adopted at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, it created the permanent United Nations process for climate diplomacy, annual Conferences of the Parties, international reporting obligations, and the core assumption that the world’s energy choices should increasingly be governed through multilateral agreements rather than national legislatures. The treaty itself did not impose hard emissions caps. Instead, it created the legal architecture for later enforcement efforts such as the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 2015 Paris Agreement.
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These agreements did not set binding targets, but they did create pressure on the United States to reduce fossil fuel consumption, the economic consequences of which are not theoretical. Carbon-reduction mandates raise the cost of electricity, discourage industrial investment, and function as a tax on manufacturing, transport, and home energy use. They thus inhibit progress. Europe’s experience is the cautionary tale. Years of aggressive decarbonization targets produced higher energy costs, deindustrialization, and vulnerability to supply shocks. Trump is wise to avoid Europe’s fate.
The time is right for leaving the treaty, as the political and intellectual momentum behind climate alarmism is cracking apart. Just last year, JPMorgan Chase, the biggest bank in the United States, announced that it is abandoning the U.N. Net-Zero Banking Alliance, joining Bank of America, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Wells Fargo. Even climate activist financier Bill Gates has acknowledged what the green movement spent years denying, that climate change will not end or even impair civilization, and obsession with near-term emissions targets is distorting priorities and undermining growth. Meanwhile, the scientific basis for catastrophism has become shakier as top journals have been forced to retract studies predicting economic disaster.
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Trump’s withdrawal from the UNFCCC is not denialism; it is realism reflected by Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s right-sized approach to climate risk. Wright rejects the adolescent moralism of the climate left, which treats energy abundance as sin and prosperity as exploitation. Instead, he starts from the basic truth that cheap, reliable energy is the foundation of human flourishing, and that the fastest way to make the world cleaner is to make it richer, more resilient, and more technologically capable.
Trump’s exit from the UNFCCC is a course correction that was overdue. The U.S. should cooperate with allies, share technology, and pursue cleaner energy where it makes sense. But it should not allow international bureaucracies to dictate energy policy, throttle growth, or force people to pay higher prices so climate activists can claim moral superiority at the next U.N. conference. The UNFCCC was designed to turn energy policy into global governance. Trump is right to say no, and to insist that prosperity, energy security, and national sovereignty are not negotiable.