The United States will be one of only four countries outside the Paris Agreement, which is designed to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.

The move announced Monday is a blow to worldwide efforts to combat global warming and distances the nation from its closest allies.

President Trump announced the withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement on Monday shortly after his inauguration, echoing a similar decision in his first term that was later reversed

Paris climate agreement is not the boogeyman that punishes the United States that critics such as President Donald Trump claim. But it hasn’t quite kept the world from overheating either. The Paris agreement is a mostly voluntary climate pact originally written in ways that would both try to reduce warming and withstand the changing political winds in the United States.

President Donald Trump will once again withdraw the United States from the Paris climate deal, the White House said on Monday, removing the world's biggest historic emitter from global efforts to fight climate change for the second time in a decade.

U.S. withdrawal from the world's primary climate pact will have a bigger impact - in the U.S. and globally - than the country's first retreat in 2017, analysts and diplomats told Reuters. One of President Donald Trump's first acts on returning to office on Monday was to quit the Paris Agreement as part of his plans to halt U.

Quitting the Paris Agreement triggers a cascade of real-world impacts and signals the beginning of an aggressive agenda to undo U.S. climate policy.