Trump signs executive order to quit Paris climate accord

WASHINGTON -- US President Donald Trump late Monday signed an executive order to pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord.

The move means the United States will pull out of the Paris climate accord for the second time.

During his inauguration speech, Trump, who has long regarded clean energy as expensive and wasteful, also vowed to redouble the efforts to extract and utilize fossil fuels. "I will also declare a national energy emergency. We will drill, baby, drill," he said.

"We have something that no other manufacturing nation will ever have -- the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth," Trump claimed. "And we are going to use it."

Adopted in December 2015, the Paris Agreement is an international endeavor to tackle human-caused global warming and related crises, which the United States formally joined in September 2016.

The first Trump administration officially let the United States, one of the world's top emitters of greenhouse gases, exit the Paris climate accord in November 2020, dealing a major blow to international efforts to combat the climate crisis.

The latest executive order by Trump will mark another round of back-and-forth moves regarding the US commitment to dealing with climate change on the global stage.

Joe Biden, who succeeded Trump to become the 46th US president in 2021, signed an executive order on Jan. 20, 2021 -- his first day in office -- to bring the United States back into the Paris climate accord.

Trump also signed a few other executive orders in front of the crowd at Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C., just a few hours after being sworn in as the 47th president of the United States, including the revocation of nearly 80 executive orders from the Biden administration.

"I'm revoking nearly 80 destructive radical executive actions of the previous administration," Trump told the crowd at the signing ceremony.