In his first campaign speech on energy policy last May, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump promised North Dakotans that, if elected, he would “cancel the Paris Climate Agreement and stop all payments of U.S. tax dollars to U.N. global-warming programs.” Soon thereafter, he pointed out that President Obama had signed onto the Paris Agreement “unilaterally, and without the permission of Congress,” in violation of the Constitution.
As a matter of good public policy, Trump ought to fulfill his campaign promise. More important, he ought to use the opportunity to restore a constitutional norm. Under President Obama, the executive branch claimed the unilateral power to negotiate and sign agreements resembling treaties. By the terms of Article II of the U.S. Constitution, two-thirds of the Senate must approve of a treaty for it to be ratified. By the Obama administration’s logic, this requirement is negated if the president declines to say the word “treaty.”
Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, tells National Review that “asking the Senate to weigh in would be restoring the treaty power.” Such a move by the Trump administration “hardly imposes new limits on the executive,” he says. Rather, it “helps a feckless Senate reclaim its own role.”
The Paris Agreement, which commenced on November 4, 2016, was signed by the U.S. and nearly 200 other nations. Building on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an international environmental treaty conceived in 1992, it seeks to reduce carbon emissions worldwide. Its signatories have agreed to limit “a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius.” The U.S., for example, has committed to reducing its emissions to over 25 percent below its 2005 levels by 2025 — and to meet ever-lower emissions targets at five-year intervals after that.