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WASHINGTON — US President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday (local time) that will let the United States withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO).
According to the text of the executive order published by the White House, it was Trump’s second attempt to exit the WHO, as his first try in 2020 did not materialise after he lost the 2020 presidential election to Democrat Joe Biden.
Trump’s decision is again based on his claims that the WHO failed “to adopt urgently needed reforms” and that it “continues to demand unfairly onerous payments from the United States, far out of proportion with other countries’ assessed payments,” as stated by the executive order.
On the same day, Trump also 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 vowed to redouble the efforts to extract and utilise 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 endeavour 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 US 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, signed an executive order on January 20, 2021 – his first day in office – to bring the US 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 DC, 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.
