US opts out of climate pact

Trump announces American withdrawal from global Paris accord

PRESIDENT Donald Trump said yesterday he would withdraw the United States from the landmark 2015 global agreement to fight climate change, spurning pleas from US allies and corporate leaders in an action that fulfilled a major campaign pledge.

“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.

“To fulfil my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens, the United States will withdraw from the Paris climate accord,” he said.

But the US would begin negotiations to re-enter either the Paris accord or a new transaction on terms that are fair to the United States, its businesses, its workers, its people, its taxpayers, he said.

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.

The United States was one of 195 nations that agreed to the accord in Paris in December 2015, a deal that former US president Barack Obama was instrumental in brokering.

Supporters of the accord condemned Trump’s move as an abdication of American leadership and an international disgrace.

“At this moment, when climate change is already causing devastating harm around the world, we do not have the moral right to turn our backs on efforts to preserve this planet for future generations,” US Senator Bernie Sanders, who sought the Democratic presidential nomination last year, said.

Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse said: “Ignoring reality and leaving the Paris agreement could go down as one of the worst foreign policy blunders in our nation’s history, isolating the US further after Trump’s shockingly bad European trip.”

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 fossil fuels and blamed by scientists for warming the planet.

The US had committed to reduce its emissions by 26% to 28% from 2005 levels by 2025.

The US, exceeded only by China in greenhouse gas emissions, accounts for more than 15% of the worldwide total.

Trump, who campaigned for president last year with an “America First” message, promised voters an American withdrawal.

US supporters of the pact said any pullout by Trump would show that the United States could no longer be trusted to follow through on international commitments.

International leaders had pressed Trump not to abandon the accord. At their meeting last month, the pope gave Trump a signed copy of his 2015 encyclical letter that called for protecting the environment from the effects of climate change.