Ignoring the advice of government officials, corporate leaders and family members, President Donald Trump on Thursday announced that the United States would pull out of the 2015 Paris Agreement that sought to impose limits on pollution that contributes to global warming.
He said he would seek to negotiate a better deal for the United States, but was dismissive of the possibility that the United States might not get one. “We will start to negotiate and we will see if we can make a deal that's fair,” he said. “If we can, that's great. And if we can't, that's fine.”
In the agreement, as it stands, 196 nations that signed the accord – it went into effect in November 2016, when India and the European Parliament ratified it – each country is to make their strategy for reducing greenhouse gas pollution public and transparent. Every five years – with the aim of keeping climate change to less than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial levels – the country's are to revisit their goals and see if stricter strategies might be required to meet the target.
The United States, in a pledge articulated by former president Barack Obama, promised to reduce emissions by as much as 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.
A slew of corporate leaders have made their opinion's known on the topic, stating the country's withdrawal from the agreement would undermine U.S. credibility and good standing among the 195 other nations of the world that signed on to the accord. Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk and Disney CEO Robert Iger both said they would give up their positions on the president's business advisory council because of his decision that even national security organizations have advised were important deterrents to global unrest. With increasingly unstable weather patterns, storms and droughts in some regions, climate change, the argument goes, a failure to control the globe's climate could be a driver of starvation and drought, leading to mass migrations and global confrontations.
Trump's argument for his stance was economic. While in the past, he has called climate change a “hoax” perpetrated by the Chinese, his Rose Garden announcement Thursday concerned the jobs and economic growth that would be lost, the president said, if the United States abides by the agreement. He said 2.5 million jobs and $3 trillion would be lost if the country went along with the accord.
Only two other nations, The Washington Post reported, are not a party to the accord and one them, Nicaragua, would not sign because they wanted a stricter agreement, especially as it concerned the efforts to arrest global warming by larger, wealthy countries, like the United States, Europe and China. The other outstanding country is Syria, which is embroiled in a civil conflict that has derailed its international diplomacy.