Will Last-Minute Wrangling Change Trump's Mind on Climate Deal?

WASHINGTON -- We find out Thursday whether or not President Donald Trump plans to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement. It's an Obama-era agreement among nearly 200 nations to fight global warming.

During his campaign, Trump criticized the hype surrounding climate change.

"A lot of it's a hoax," he said.

And in a decision supported by conservatives, he promised to get the U.S. out of the agreement.

"We're going to cancel the Paris climate agreement," he said to applause at a campaign event, "and stop the payment of all U.S. tax dollars to U.N. global warming programs."

Some administration officials are signaling he'll keep his promise, but inside the White House, Trump's top advisers have been split. 

Steve Bannon and a group of more than 20 Republican senators urged him to pull out, while Ivanka Trump, her husband Jared Kushner, Democrats and European leaders pushed him to stay in it.

"I continue to lobby the U.S. at all levels to continue to take climate change extremely seriously and to show the leadership that America has shown in the past," urged Boris Johnson, Britain's foreign secretary.

Even Pope Francis encouraged the president to keep the U.S. in the deal, last week gifting him with a copy of a paper he wrote on human-driven climate change.

Critics point out that the Paris agreement would have little real effect on global temperatures, and they say other countries get off relatively easy while the U.S. would pay a significant price.

The agreement, made by President Barack Obama, requires the U.S. to cut greenhouse gases by nearly 30 percent below 2005 levels in eight years. It's an ambitious goal that would be costly. Some economists predict the deal would result in the loss of 400,000 jobs and income loss of more than 20,000 for a family of four.

It's a deal that runs counter to Trump's focus on drastically reducing burdensome regulations on businesses and adding jobs to the economy with an emphasis on manufacturing and mining jobs.

An agreement is all it is. President Obama chose to shake on the deal without involving the U.S. Senate, which under the Constitution is supposed to approve international treaties. Still, experts say a formal withdrawal from the accord would take years. 

A master deal-maker, Trump has his staff looking at caveats in the language. The final decision is ultimately his and keeping with his decision-making practice, the president is hearing from people on all sides.