WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump has delayed his call on the United States’ future in the Paris climate accord until the end of the month.

 

Meanwhile, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is quietly dismantling many references to climate change on the agency’s website, and in recent weeks has slashed nine of the nation’s top scientists to the EPA’s Board of Scientific Counselors (BSC).

Following a series of recent White House meetings among Trump’s top advisors and cabinet secretaries, Trump made the decision May 9 to hold off on withdrawing from the United Nations Climate Change Paris Agreement, or accord, until after he meets with the Group of Seven (G-7) leaders this week in Sicily, Italy.

According to the 2014 interagency National Climate Assessment, unmitigated climate change has had a varied and broad dramatic effect on the nation’s agriculture, including droughts, cold snaps, increased pests and extreme weather events that have caused widespread damage and interruptions to crops and farmer profits.

The Center for American Progress reports that emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) from agricultural processes have risen to 11 percent of all U.S. GHG emissions from a 1990 level of 9 percent.

Various media accounts have detailed at the White House an internal debate between Paris accord supporters and opponents over the past month, with strong support not to withdraw coming from Trump’s daughter and son-in-law – both also Presidential advisors – Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, along with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Energy Secretary Rick Perry.

Pushing to dump the accord are Pruitt, Senior Advisor Steve Bannon and White House counsel Don McGahn. Last month, the National Farmers Union urged the White House not to pull out of the deal, telling Trump, “Farmers are on the front lines of climate change.”

On May 10, several of the nation’s top newspapers published a full-page advertisement urging him to not abandon the accord, including Dow Chemical chief Andrew Liveris and DuPont boss Ed Breen, as well as top Wall Street bankers, some of Trump’s friends and strongest supporters.

“Based on our experience doing business all over the world, we believe there is strong potential for negative trade implications if the United State exits from the Paris agreement,” 30 top U.S. business leaders wrote in an open-letter plea to Trump. All are members of his manufacturers’ advisory panel. Also signing the letter were Google and Apple.

More than 40 conservative organizations set a letter to Trump last week “in enthusiastic support of your campaign commitments to withdraw fully from the Paris climate treaty and to stop all taxpayer funding on UN global warming programs.”

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told reporters that Trump will wait to make his decision “to make sure that he continues to meet with his team to create the best strategy for this country going forward.”

Earlier this month, just after being elected as president of France and a G-7 leader, Emmanuel Macron called Trump and urged him not to dismantle the Paris accord. The Paris agreement was signed by more than 190 world leaders on Earth Day, April 22, 2016, and took effect Nov. 4.

The members agreed to hold global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-Industrial Revolution levels and to strive for 1.5 degrees Celsius.

 

China and the U.S. are named two of the world’s biggest sources of GHG emissions. China is responsible for 20.09 percent of global emissions, white the U.S is responsible for 17.89 percent, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report of 2016.

The lower goal was a demand of poorer countries and island states facing a high risk of raising sea levels due to climate changes. The U.S. pledges to cut GHG emissions by 26-28 percent from 2005 levels, by 2025. The European Union plans to cut emissions by 40 percent by 2030, on 1990 levels.

Under the Paris accord, each participating country will decide its own set of emissions targets and a plan to reach them.

Trump is on his first European and Middle East trip, visiting five countries over eight days, first stopping this past weekend in Saudi Arabia and Israel, then attending the NATO Summit in Brussels and today (May 24) visiting the Pope in Rome, ending up May 26-27 in southern Italy for the G-7.

If he were to decide on the Paris accord ahead of the summit, he would face a harsh diplomatic backlash in meetings with other world leaders. He could still face diplomatic upheaval if he backs out of it later, ahead of the G-20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany, on July 7-8.

At the EPA, Pruitt has begun overhauling two of the most important scientific advisory boards, dropping nine members of the 18-member BSC and putting all 47 members of the Science Advisory Board under review. The nine scientists were dropped after it was decided their three-year terms would not be renewed.

 

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, those scientists will now be replaced by representatives from industries that the EPA is required to regulate.

Conservatives have for years questioned the approach to science by board members, many who are respected as some of the top scientists in their fields.

An EPA spokesman, J.P. Freire, told the Washington Post in an email “no one has been fired or terminated,” but that Pruitt simply wanted fresh advisors. The EPA sent out notices over the weekend telling members their terms would not be renewed.

The move follows a 2018 budget proposal that cuts funding to advisory boards by 84 percent, or $542,000, cutting operational costs for board travel and public meetings for the outside experts.

Pruitt is also updating an EPA website aimed at schoolchildren titled “A Student’s Guide to Global Climate Change,” making its information difficult to access, according to watchdog group the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. The group has been monitoring changes the EPA has undertaken to public science and environmental sites, in many cases eliminating all reference to climate change discussion.

In other action out of public view, Pruitt signed a “recusal statement” on May 4, agreeing to step away from several lawsuits pending against the EPA that he filed while still Oklahoma’s attorney general.

He also agreed not to participate in legal proceedings over the Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal.