Vatican speaks on US pull out

US PRESIDENT Donald Trump is sending the country’s energy production “back to the past” with disastrous decisions to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement and to promote the coal industry, a senior Vatican official said.

Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, head of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, said Pope Francis was concerned that any harm to the environment will be like a “boomerang that will come back… especially to poor people” with ever worsening effects.

Trump said on June 1 he was pulling the US out of the 195-nation Paris climate agreement, the first to oblige all nations to limit greenhouse gas emissions, saying he wanted to create jobs in the US fossil fuel industry.

Trump said participating in the pact would undermine the US economy, wipe out jobs, weaken national sovereignty and put his country at a permanent disadvantage.

“This is to go back to the past and not to see the future,” Sanchez Sorondo said. Withdrawal from the Paris Agreement “is a disaster for this country (the US) and also for all the world”, he said, echoing remarks he made to an Italian newspaper just before Trump’s announcement.

Many other leaders have expressed dismay and anger at Trump’s withdrawal and pledged to push ahead with the Paris accord. Among them, German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged action to protect “Mother Earth”.

During his campaign, Trump dismissed man-made climate change as a hoax. By contrast, a UN panel of climate scientists says it is at least 95% probable that most warming since the 1950s was caused by human activities.

Sanchez Sorondo will attend a meeting in Oslo on Monday of faith leaders to discuss how to protect tropical rainforests such as in the Amazon or Congo basins. – Reuters