COULD RETURN TO PARIS DEAL: TRUMP
Insists accord would have taken away US’s competitive edge
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump has said the US could “conceivably” return to the Paris climate deal, an accord that he had earlier called “unfair” and castigated as being designed to benefit developing countries such as India and China.
“We could conceivably go back in ... I feel very strongly about the environment,” Trump said, during a joint news conference at the White House with Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg on Wednesday.
“The Paris agreement as drawn and as we signed is very unfair to the United States... It put great penalties on us … it hurt out businesses,” he said.
“According to some estimates we would have had to close businesses to qualify by 2025,” Trump said, referring to the self-determined emission mitigation goal picked by the Obama administration.
Evidently, Trump still believes the agreement is unfair but spared India the invectives this time, and focussed instead on China and Russia, saying they were being held to easier standards as far as emission mitigation targets were concerned.
Trump announced in June 2017 he was pulling the United States out of the Paris accord. The break will be formally completed in 2020.
But Trump, who once called climate change a hoax played by the Chinese, has kept the door open, calling himself a supporter of clean air and water. “We are very strong on the environment,” he said on Wednesday, adding that his environment protection agency leaders were “very, very powerful in the sense that they want to have clean water, clean air, but we also want (our) businesses that can compete and the Paris accord would really have take away our competitive edge.”
This, of course, depends on whether or not Trump changes his mind.
In June, he had said the US could come back in a renegotiated deal, which all signatory countries — including India — have ruled out for now.
But that has not stopped the administration from floating time and again the possibility of the United States to return to the fold. In the meantime, though, Trump has rolled back some of the emission-reducing measures introduced by his predecessor Barack Obama.