President Donald Trump has formally withdrawn the United States from the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.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.