.@realDonaldTrump gets a 💯 on this:
"The Paris accord was not designed to save the environment. It was designed to kill the American economy."@JoeBiden would be the best President America's enemies ever had. https://t.co/d9bjHMKEsz
— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) November 23, 2020
President Trump took aim Sunday at the Paris climate accord, the 2015 global agreement to designed to curb the effects of climate change from which he pledged to withdraw the United States in 2017, asserting during a virtual statement to the G-20 summit that the pact was designed to “kill the American economy” rather than “save the environment,” the Associated Press reported.
KEY FACTS
The United States’ departure from the agreement was formalized earlier this month.
President-elect Biden has pledged to rejoin the nearly 200 countries that have ratified the agreement on his first day in office in January.
Trump told the summit on Sunday that the U.S. has reduced its carbon emissions more than any other country, which is true on a raw tonnage basis, though the AP noted that when looking at it in terms of percentage reduction in emissions, the U.S. has not been nearly as successful as other nations.
KEY BACKGROUND
This isn’t the first time Trump argued that U.S. participation in the landmark global climate pact would harm the economy. During an address at the White House in 2017, he said that the Paris Agreement “handicaps the United States economy in order to win praise from the very foreign capitals and global activists that have long sought to gain wealth at our country’s expense.” Economists at the London School of Economics noted in August that the economy would actually be better off if the U.S. remained in the Paris Agreement because of the costs to U.S. infrastructure caused by the effects of climate change and the fact that a global policy response is necessary to limit growth in emissions around the world, which will harm the United States regardless of whether or not the U.S. participates in the accord. The LSE researchers also noted that the requirements of the agreement would be “easier to achieve” for the United States since technology costs have fallen so dramatically.
