Roger Pielke Jr Thinks USA Wrong To Leave IPCC and UNFCCC
One of the reasons we very much value Roger Pielke Jr.’s writings is that he always gives us something to think about, even when we disagree with him
As we do, at least part-way, in response to his reaction to news that Trump is pulling the US out of 66 international agencies including the IPCC and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the two agencies that form the bedrock of international climate policy.
Pielke Jr. writes that “Leaving the IPCC and UNFCCC is Bad for the United States” because “Multilateralism matters for normal Americans”.
He grants that it gives Donald Trump good MAGA propaganda, and that the Biden administration embraced these outfits in a spirit “arguably more about propaganda than policy”.
But we respectfully think he is wrong, partly because he underestimates the magnitude of the shift, or more precisely shift back, in American geopolitics, and partly because having everyone pretend bad organizations are good in the hope that it will cause them to become good has a long and dismal history.
On the latter point, and bearing in mind Abba Eben’s immortal statement “A consensus means that everyone agrees to say collectively what no one believes individually”, RPJ may be right that “A robust IPCC serves U.S. interests” because:
“The U.S. helped to create the IPCC in the 1980s to push back against climate activism perceived to [be] contrary to U.S. interests, notably that based on flawed or exaggerated scientific claims.”
But he is wrong to believe that the IPCC has, on balance, effectively pushed back on flawed or exaggerated scientific claims.
Oh, sure, the detailed working papers are often quite sound, and we at CDN frequently cite them to refute wacky alarmism. But if you look at what journalists and zealots generally say about the IPCC, it is that it represents a scientific ‘consensus’ that we have a real, urgent, man-made ‘climate crisis’ and need a solid political commitment to make it stop.
If so, they would be misled.
And if the IPCC did not exist, would the zealots and hangers-on be less prone to say such things, and persuade the unwary?
Thus under the “all the news that’s fit to faint” heading, the New York Times ‘Climate Forward‘ wrote:
“Trump Pulls Out of Global Climate Treaty/ The action could make it more difficult for a future administration to rejoin the Paris climate accord, the agreement among most nations to fight climate change.”
And, it went on to call it “the bedrock international agreement that forms the basis for countries to rein in climate change.” Someone reading such prose might assume that most signatories to Paris are making ‘meaningful’ progress on ‘GHG’ emissions and homing in on ‘net zero’, or at least trying hard.
And possibly also that without Paris they could not take ‘meaningful’ action.
The piece goes on:
“The moves cement the United States’ isolation from the rest of the world when it comes to fighting climate change.”
And anyone reading that prose might conclude that the rest of the world is “fighting climate change” with something other than their mouths and that there is something to be gained from attaching ourselves to their efforts which, again, would mean they had been misinformed.
Now contrast the alternative scenario where, absent Donald Trump’s calming influence, or Joe Biden’s, the IPCC were to become as loony-left as the advocates and activists claim.
Would it make the global warming scare more credible, or more absurd?
The U.S. going along, or pretending to, has given it credibility that Radio Moscow never had, and did not deserve. When everyone pretends to believe things they do not believe, and to like things they do not like, it destroys the independence of thought and impudent challenges to authority that are the power as well as the glory of free societies.
Reuters ‘Sustainable Switch‘ of course had a snit about it, sniffing:
“some legal experts say that this decision may be illegal, adding that Congress would need to approve its exit as it was a decision by the U.S. Senate which unanimously adopted that climate treaty more than 30 years ago.
The U.N. climate chief Simon Stiell said the move was a ‘colossal own goal which will leave the U.S. less secure and less prosperous,’ adding that the U.S. leaving these treaties at such a time is harmful to its economy and living standards ‘as wildfires, floods, mega-storms and droughts get rapidly worse.’”
As if to prove why the organizations in question have become manifestly worthless. Why should the U.S. government, or any other, fund bureaucracies that not only serve up such manifestly incorrect claims about fires, floods, hurricanes and so forth, but claim to be the world’s only legitimate scientific authority on the subject while doing so?
Well, Pielke Jr. also says:
“U.S. engagement in multilateral organizations is a source of soft power that has proven meaningful to advance U.S. interests — obviously in economics and defense, but also in 2026 in science as well.”
Really? How?
If the UNFCCC did not exist, or the U.S. were not in it, would American “soft power” be less powerful, less soft or both? Is that country influential because of large global bureaucratic entities, or the irrepressible spirit of freedom that gave the world Coca Cola, Elvis Presley and John Wayne?
Is soft power something you buy in a state-run store? Or does it maybe, just maybe, mean a little bit more?
Consider also that the Green Party of Canada lurched ataxically into the fray with a press release “Green Party of Canada Leader Says Trump Is in Violation of the U.S. Constitution Over UNFCCC Withdrawal Claim”.
Which they somehow failed to post on their website, perhaps because it is not worth posting. The Supreme Court is not going to hurl Trump back into the UNFCCC. It’s just another childish everything-I-dislike-is-illegal-and-unconstitutional piece of make-believe.
To its credit, Jillian Goodman in Heatmap addressed the issue of constitutionality and wrote:
“As University of Pennsylvania constitutional law professor Jean Galbraith told me, ‘This is an issue on which the text of the constitution is silent — it tells you how to make a treaty, but it doesn’t tell you anything about how to unmake a treaty.’”
Also, as RPJ himself says:
“The UNFCCC is technically a ‘non-self-executing’ international agreement. That means that as a signatory, the U.S. has no formal obligations other than those that might come in the aftermath of becoming a signatory, i.e., that Congress and the President together decide to implement in law….
The U.S. Congress has steadfastly refused to pass any legislation that would turn U.S. participation under the UNFCCC into legal obligations for emissions reductions (or anything else).
In January, 2025 the Trump administration announced that the U.S. would no longer contribute funding to the UNFCCC. The degree and substance of U.S. participation under the UNFCCC has therefore always been at the discretion of the administration in power.”
So if Ms. May and her colleagues imagine the ghost of Earl Warren will shake its gory locks at Trump and force him to attend COP31, they are even more deluded than usual.
As is the New York Times ‘Climate Forward’, which also wrote that “United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change… forms the legal foundation for global climate cooperation” when in fact it is sovereign nations acting according to their own domestic law that do or, far more often, do not engage in “global climate cooperation”.
The fact that Congress has never passed any such enabling legislation regarding the UNFCCC brings us to the second and larger way in which we think Pielke Jr. like many others, has missed the point about what’s happening, and why, and what it portends.
Many people think that the United States reverting to unilateralism, scorning foreigners and especially globalists, and expanding territorially is a bizarre departure from American tradition. But they are mistaken.
Only since 1945 has the US been deeply engaged in, and committed to upholding, a liberal international order in partnership with other Western nations and not a few dubious allies of convenience.
Getting Washington into the UN was hard, and into NATO and the foreign aid business was even harder. It took vision and courage and determination in the Democratic and Republican parties alike, from now-forgotten statesmen like, say, Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan.
It was the product of the very violent and frightening first half of the 20th century, and it resulted in a Pax Americana that for all its faults was of great value to the world and, as Pielke Jr. says, to Americans themselves.
But precisely for that reason, those free or semi-free nations that benefitted from the U.S. security guarantee, and decades of fairly stable policy towards and thinking about world affairs, ought to have worked very hard to keep Americans engaged and positive about their role as global policeman.
They did the opposite, including Canadians. They indulged in cheap and reflexive anti-Americanism at every opportunity. They let the U.S. do the heavy lifting. They neglected their own militaries, undermined Western civilization from within, and just assumed Uncle Sam would never get tired or fed up.
It was a catastrophic miscalculation that may well prove disastrous for the U.S. as well but certainly will for Western Europe.
The U.S. was never all-in on globalism. Just as the Senate refused to ratify the Covenant of the League of Nations lest it bind or seem to bind their nation in foreign affairs, so when the Kyoto Protocol was being negotiated the Senate voted 98-0 against adopting any binding commitments.
But is the world worse off because the U.S. has stood, often almost alone, against what critics of multilateralism back in Vandenberg’s day dubbed “globaloney”? Because the U.S. stood with Israel when others did not?
When it resisted one trendy piece of leftist internationalism after another, from the Club of Rome to nuclear disarmament?
Bloomberg Green doesn’t get it in spades:
“The Trump administration’s decision to quit two major climate bodies has been labeled ‘a gift’ to China that will diminish the US’s global standing and hurt the world’s ability to fight global warming.”
As if the US’s global standing derived from writing endless cheques to bloated and corrupt UN agencies rather than from wielding unparalleled global economic and military power. Or were not, at least among the smart set, at the same dismal level it has held since roughly the Vietnam War.
Moreover what exactly is this fabled “world’s ability to fight global warming”? The thing on display at COP30? As for China, if it wants to take the lead on emissions reductions and start shutting down its coal plants, it can go ahead.
But don’t look to international law to make it. (Plus “has been labeled” turns out to refer to that most impartial and wise of observers, former Obama Secretary of State and Biden ‘climate envoy’ John Kerry.)
A world in which all the decent people pretend to believe indecent things to keep “dialogue” going is one in which surrenders on symbolic matters soon become surrenders on substantive ones.
And if the IPCC responds to the removal of whatever moderating influence the US exercised by going completely publicly nuts, good riddance to bad rubbish.
Pielke Jr. says:
“If the IPCC did not exist, we’d have to invent it — so we should make it as robust as possible.”
We disagree.
Science is not done by consensus, it isn’t a vote.
International negotiation or politics and we cannot imagine any other field in which anyone thinks we’d get better science if we created a similar outfit. Science is done by individual scientists and teams challenging conventional wisdom.
Including, dare we say, about the automatic virtues of multilateralism. Remember the wise words of Bertrand de Jouvenal, that he believed in world government until he crossed the Swiss border half an hour ahead of the Nazis.
But of course Switzerland alone could not have withstood Hitler had Britain fallen as France did. And Britain would have fallen without America. It was not an independent Switzerland that avoided appeasement in the 1930s then overthrew tyrannies in the 1940s. It was an independent United States.
If Americans feel that multilateralism is no longer working for them, it is time to reform multilateralism. And Washington withdrawing from the smug wreckage might be just the jolt it needs.
RPJ writes in conclusion that:
“Participating in and improving these institutions would be difficult work. We should try it, not run away. Americans like to say that when things get tough, the tough get going.”
True. But sometimes they get going out the door, and rightly so. As the old song says, sometimes leaving is the loving thing to do, because it forces a reassessment.
As for instance with the U.S. withholding money from the UN, a globalist dream gone wrong if ever there was one, and as the National Post just noted, Trump’s withdrawal from some 66 international organizations “unfolded about a week after the UN approved a seven per cent budget cut as it grapples with a financial crisis driven largely by the refusal of the U.S. to pay what it owes.”
The UN will not engage in any sort of reform if not pushed into it by the U.S. finally refusing to pay to be abused and insulted, along with Israel, by dictatorships and failed states.
Is there any chance of the UNFCCC fixing its own problems if no one holds its feet to the fire?
See more here climatediscussionnexus
Editor’s note: I am rather surprised Roger Pielke wants America, or any nation for that matter, to remain wedded to the IPCC and UNFCCC, two of the worst groups for pushing misinformation about the climate. Some folks might almost conclude Pielke is actually an alarmist in skeptic’s clothing.