President Donald Trump will shortly announce that the US is withdrawing from the 2015 Paris climate agreement, US media report.
Trump is set to say the Paris agreement “front loads costs on American people,” Reuters reported, citing a White House policy document.
In his speech he will say that the pact “frontloads costs on American people” penalising them for years of economic growth to pay for the world’s problems, and that he will seek a “better deal”.
In so doing he makes good on a campaign promise to fight for the jobs of American workers but undermines international efforts to limit global warming to less than 2C.
World leaders urged Trump to keep the US in the agreement, underscoring the risk of further international isolation for the world’s largest economy.
At a summit between European and Chinese leaders in Berlin, China’s Premier Li Keqiang said: “China will stand by its responsibilities on climate change.”
UN secretary general Antonio Guterres earlier warned the support of the world’s largest economy was crucial for the seminal agreement, according to the BBC.
Guterres said: “The Paris agreement is essential for our collective future and it’s also important that American society – like all other societies, the business community – mobilise themselves in order to preserve the Paris agreement.”
Before his election last November Trump emphasised his campaign pledge to scrap the agreement.
Trump argued the Paris agreement was a burden on jobs in the coal-mining industry and a drag on growth.
The agreement was reached in 2015 after an exhausting round of failed conferences. It was hailed at the time as an historic first step on the road to tackling the causes of climate change.
In 2012 he tweeted that climate change was a hoax “by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive”.
The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.
Meanwhile, China and India had been slow to address the issue of global warming — fearing it would hold back the pace of development. In India for example, 240 million people remain without electricity. But experts now predict that China’s carbon emissions will peak, and then begin to decline, significantly earlier than the country’s 2030 target, and the country is investing more in renewable energy than any other nation in the world, pledging a further $360 billion by 2020.
“China will continue to carry out innovation, green, open and shared development regardless of how the other countries’ positions are changing, based on the inherent needs of its own sustainable development,” Hua Chunying, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said in a press conference this week in Beijing, Washington Post Reported.
Meanwhile, India — which set a target of increasing its renewable power capacity to 175 gigawatts by 2022 — has exceeded its targets for wind power this fiscal year and has made some strides in increasing its solar capacity, according to a study from the World Resources Institute. According to Washington Post, Recent low solar prices may make renewable power increasingly competitive.
BBC/REUTERS/WASHINGTON POST
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