President Donald Trump on Thursday said he will withdraw the United States from the landmark 2015 global agreement to fight climate change, spurning pleas from U.S. allies and corporate leaders in an action that fulfilled a major campaign pledge.
Supporters of the accord condemned Trump’s move as an abdication of American leadership, an international disgrace and a monumental foreign policy blunder. His predecessor, Barack Obama, expressed regret over the pullout from a deal he was instrumental in brokering.
“We’re getting out,” Trump said at a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden in which he decried the Paris accord’s “draconian” financial and economic burdens. He said American withdrawal “represents a reassertion of American sovereignty.”
Trump said the United States would begin negotiations either to re-enter the Paris accord or to have a new agreement “on terms that are fair to the United States, its businesses, its workers, its people, its taxpayers.”
U.S. allies voiced dismay over Trump’s move, and France, Germany and Italy dismissed his suggestion that the global pact could be revised.
With Trump’s action, the United States will walk away from nearly every nation in the world on one of the pressing global issues of the 21st century. The pullout will align the United States with Syria and Nicaragua as the world’s only non-participants in the accord.
Trump said the United States would cease payments to the U.N. Green Climate Fund, in which rich countries committed billions of dollars to help developing countries deal with floods, droughts and other impacts from climate change.
The United States was one of 195 nations that agreed to the accord in Paris in December 2015. But Trump said the accord would “undermine our economy, hamstring our workers, weaken our sovereignty, impose unacceptable legal risk, and put us at a permanent disadvantage to the other countries of the world.”
“We don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us any more. And they won’t be,” Trump added as he tapped into the “America First” message he used when he was elected president last year.
Under the pact, which was years in the making, nations both rich and poor committed to reducing emissions of so-called greenhouse gases generated by burning fossils fuels and blamed by scientists for warming the planet.
“I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris,” the Republican president said.
Obama, a Democrat, said in a statement that the nations that remain in the agreement will be the ones that reap the benefits in jobs and industries created.
Reuters