A boon in disguise?

America's withdrawal from the climate-rescue Paris Agreement under Donald Trump is a blow to global unity but may be a blessing in disguise for the pact itself, observers said.

This way, the Trump administration, heavily influenced by the fossil-fuel industry, will have less sway over the UN climate process, they said.

"A rogue US can cause more damage inside... than outside of the agreement," said Luke Kemp, a climate policy lecturer at the Australian National University.

Continued US participation in the Paris forum would have been merely symbolic, and yielded no impact on reducing US emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases, he argued.

"It's better Trump is outside the agreement rather than pulling it down from the inside," added Mohamed Adow of Christian Aid, which lobbies for poor country interests at the two-decade-old UN climate negotiations.

"With Trump we were at best only going to have America's name on the agreement," he told AFP.

Trump announced America is "getting out" of a deal he said imposed "draconian" burdens that would cost the US millions of jobs and billions in cold hard cash.

The pact was "very unfair" to the United States and beneficial to other major polluters like China and India, the president claimed.

His proposal to open negotiations for a new or updated deal was quickly rebuffed by France, Italy and Germany, leaving America out in the diplomatic cold.

Veteran observers of the decades-old process welcomed an end to the "will he, won't he?" seesaw that has distracted the ongoing climate talks since Trump's election last November.

And they warned the United States would be hardest hit -- economically and diplomatically by the fallout.

"The decision is based on last century's economics and will turn the US into last century's economy," Andrew Steer, president of the World Resources Institute (WRI) think-tank, predicted.

According to the CITEPA research institute, America's renewable energy sector in America employed some 800,000 people in 2016 -- nearly five times more than the fossil-fuel sector.

Hundreds of American companies have urged the Trump administration to stay the clean energy course.