No balls.........

Europe’s leaders watch silently as Trump torches UN climate treaty

Beset by crisis in Ukraine and Greenland, leaders let the U.S. withdrawal from the world’s most important climate body pass with barely a mention.

By Karl Mathiesen, Zia Weise and Charlie Cooper

Europe’s leaders have discovered yet another hill they are unwilling to die on: their long-held dream of a world fighting climate change together.

President Donald Trump launched his most far-reaching attack on the international climate process Wednesday by ordering the U.S. to withdraw from the 1992 treaty that underpins most global attempts to stave off global warming.

It means the world's richest country and second-largest greenhouse gas emitter will play no further part in United Nations-led efforts to mitigate climate change — a position that could prove impossible to reverse by a future U.S. administration.

European leaders might, then, have been expected to respond with loud condemnation. But the silence was deafening.

Ursula von der Leyen? Schtum. Keir Starmer? Crickets. Emmanuel Macron, meanwhile, was low-key.

On Thursday, in a speech to French diplomats, the French president admitted the U.S. attacks on multilateralism, including Wednesday’s pledge to withdraw from 66 international organizations spanning environmental, social and human rights issues — the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) among them — “weakens all the bodies through which we can resolve common issues.”

But Macron warned his officials: "We are not here to comment, we are here to act … If we have an intelligent response to offer, we do so. If we don't have an intelligent response to offer, we look elsewhere."

It’s a far cry from 2017, when leaders across Europe lined up to hammer Trump for ditching the Paris Agreement — a less serious violation of the international regime, given there are now questions about whether the U.S. will ever be able to rejoin the UNFCCC, in which the Paris Agreement resides.

But the world looks very different now than it did in 2017. Climate change concerns have been sucked into the black hole of Trump’s geopolitical tumult, and even if Europeans feel aggrieved, little sign of it has escaped the event horizon.

"With Europeans still critically reliant on U.S. intelligence and being able to purchase U.S. arms to ensure Ukraine’s survival, it makes no sense to criticize Trump’s latest assault on combating climate change, just as they haven’t criticized the Venezuela operation," said Robin Niblett, former director of the Chatham House foreign affairs think tank. 

Pick your battles

EU leaders have demonstrated this week that violations of international law and multilateral trust are way below the bar for confronting the Trump administration. Only a direct threat to invade European territory in Greenland has stirred Europe’s leaders to respond.

“This is the bigger picture we're seeing — European leaders essentially sort of pick their battles in this environment, and unfortunately, the UNFCCC process isn't their biggest priority right now,” said Susi Dennison, senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. 

On top of that, she added, Trump’s attacks on climate action have lost their shock value. Wednesday’s announcement is “consistent with the withdrawal from climate action as a specific goal of the administration,” she said. 

Officials in the offices of the leaders of Britain, France, Germany and the European Commission declined requests from POLITICO to comment on the announcement that the U.S. would ditch the UNFCCC and also withdraw from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.N. climate science body, and the Green Climate Fund. 

The response was left to a smattering of lowly environment ministers, who expressed a mixture of exasperation and anger but very little shock at the announcement. (German Climate Minister Carsten Schneider simply noted that it “comes as no surprise.”) 

One of the most prominent criticisms came from European Commission Executive Vice-President Teresa Ribera, a Spanish socialist who is one of the EU executive's most outspoken advocates for strong climate action. “The White House doesn’t care about environment, health or suffer[ing] of people,” she said on social media.

Meanwhile, in the U.K., the populist right-wing Reform party, currently leading in the polls, said Britain should follow suit and ditch the climate treaty.

Europe alone

Schneider, the German minister, also echoed a common view in saying the move would leave the U.S. isolated on the international stage. But Washington’s exit also leaves the Europeans without a key ally in global negotiations. 

Europe discovered what it meant for the U.S. to be absent from U.N. climate talks in Brazil last year when the Trump administration decided to send no delegates. A coalition of emerging economies effectively quashed any chance that the conference would make meaningful advances or that the Europeans would pursue their agenda.

Legal opinions vary on whether a U.S. reentry to the UNFCCC would be as straightforward as a presidential decree or if it would require the U.S. Senate to ratify the deal, as it did in the early 1990s. The chance of a lockout raises the prospect of a permanent rebalancing of power inside the U.N. climate process.

The Trump administration’s withdrawal from the IPCC comes as it drafts its next round of vital climate science reports. While the move doesn't stop individual U.S. scientists from contributing, Washington will not get to influence the report summaries that end up informing policymakers, which need to be signed off on by all governments. 

As with the U.N. climate talks, others may step into the vacuum to take advantage of the U.S. absence. But Dennison thinks it won’t be the Europeans. 

“I'm no longer even remotely optimistic that Europe is capable right now of playing that role,” she said, pointing to the growing divisions over climate action among EU governments and the rollbacks of key green legislation over the past year. “I don't think that Europeans are going to step into any void.”