US tells UN it is pulling out of Paris climate deal
THE Trump administration has formally notified the United Nations that it will withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, the first formal step in a one-year process to exit the global pact to fight climate change, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Monday.
The US, one of the world’s biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions, would become the only country to leave the pact, a decision Trump promised to boost US oil, gas and coal industries.
Pompeo’s statement touted the US’ carbon pollution cuts and called the Paris deal an “unfair economic burden” to the US economy.
The State Department letter to UN SecretaryGeneral Antonio Guterres started the clock on a process that would be completed one day after the 2020 US presidential election, on November 4, 2020.
While the move was expected, “we regret this and it makes the Franco-Chinese partnership on climate and biodiversity even more necessary”, President Emmanuel Macron said as he begins his visit to China.
Macron and President Xi Jinping will sign a joint document on climate during talks in Beijing on Wednesday that will declare the “irreversibility of the Paris accord”, the French presidency said.
Nearly 200 nations signed the climate deal in which each country provides its own goals to curb emissions of heat-trapping gases that lead to climate change.
The administration of former US President Barack Obama signed the US onto the pact, promising a 26-28 percent cut in US greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 from 2005 levels.
Trump campaigned on a promise to rescind that pledge, saying it would hurt the US economy while leaving other big polluters like China to increase emissions. But he was bound by UN rules to wait until Monday to file exit papers.
Trump has been slammed at home and abroad for his intentions to withdraw from the agreement. Earlier this year, millions marched around the world, calling for immediate action against climate change.
Niklas Hohne, founder of the NewClimate Institute in Cologne, Germany, said in a briefing last week that the “world’s second-largest emitter is intentionally turning its back on the Paris Agreement”.
He added that the consequence of having “higher emissions in 2030 than today is an irresponsible act at a time when the climate crisis demands urgent action”.
Michael Bloomberg, the UN secretary-general’s special envoy for climate action and a former New York City mayor, said in a statement that “abandoning the Paris Agreement is an abdication of leadership that the vast majority of Americans oppose”.
Since coming to office, Trump has embraced a series of regulatory breaks and boosts sought by the coal and utility industries, including overturning US support of the Paris climate accord and scrapping a legacy Obama climate programme aimed at pushing dirtier-burning coal plants out of the country’s electrical grid.
Separately on Monday, the Trump administration accelerated the pace of its environmental rollbacks for the country’s coal-fired power plants, proposing to weaken two Obama-era rules aimed at cleaning up dangerous heavy metals and ash from coal plants into groundwater and waterways.
The new proposals reduce “heavy burdens on electricity producers across the country”, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said in a statement on Monday.
Climate Action Tracker, a collaborative and independent scientific tool to monitor government emissions targets, said in a statement on Friday that the withdrawal from the Paris agreement and the rollbacks in US climate policy will leave US greenhouse gas emissions three percent higher in 2030 than they would be with the policies still in place.
Responding to the Trump administration’s move on Monday, environmental groups said they hoped the US president would be defeated in 2020 by a rival who would re-join the agreement with bold new targets.
“The next president will need to rejoin the accord immediately and commit to the rapid, wholesale clean-energy transformation the climate emergency demands,” said Jean Su, energy director with the Centre for Biological Diversity. Al Jazeera
AMRAVATI (India) More female farmers are committing suicide in the western Indian state of Maharashtra where a decades-long agrarian crisis has reportedly driven more than 30 000 farmers to end their lives.
Al Jazeera managed to access government data collated by local authorities that shows that in the Amravati district alone, since 2018, 22 female farmers have ended their lives, with an average of one suicide a month.
But, experts and advocacy activists in the field believe the situation is far worse and the Indian government’s policies to withhold data about it might only be complicating the situation.
At the state level, across the other 35 districts of Maharashtra, authorities told Al Jazeera that there was no gender-segregated data available. The western state saw the number of farmers’ suicides doubled to 11 995 in the last four years, according to a government figure revealed in a Right to Information query.
Federally, the Indian government, till 2015, used to publish annual statistics of farmer suicides in the country. But, for the last four years, the government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has blocked its release and publicly said that it does not maintain this data any more.
As a result, experts believe the actual number of female farmer suicides is increasing as a result of women being pushed into the agrarian distress that engulfs the region. This is driven by various reasons from being forced to take on the mantle of a breadwinner without adequate government support to heavy farm debts incurred due to losses. Al Jazeera