Paris Agreement: Trump confirms US will leave climate accord - BBC News - 0 views
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The US will definitely withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, President Trump has confirmed.
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He described the accord as a bad deal and said his pro fossil fuel policies had made the US an energy superpower.
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The pull-out will take effect a year later - the day after the 2020 US presidential election – assuming that Mr Trump is re-elected. The Paris agreement brought together 195 nations in the battle to combat climate change.
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President Trump said if he couldn’t improve that deal he’d pull out, but diplomatic sources said there’s been no major effort at renegotiation.
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Mr Trump promised that he’d turn the US into an energy superpower, and he’s attempting to sweep away a raft of pollution legislation to reduce the cost of producing gas, oil and coal.He categorised former US President Barack Obama’s environmental clean-up plans as a war on American energy.
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Campaigners say these now represent nearly 70% of US GDP and nearly 65% of the US population. If they were a country, this group would be the world’s second largest economy.The rebels are led by California, which is locked in a battle with the president over his plans to repeal their powers to impose clean air standards.
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So far the biggest negative effect of Mr Trump’s stance has arguably been to relax pressure on countries like Brazil and Saudi Arabia to take action of their own.Environmentalists say Mr Obama would have acted quickly to press Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro to tackle forest fires in the Amazon, for instance. Mr Obama agreed in Paris that the US should take a lead on climate change because it’s contributed far more than any other nation to the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere.
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China - the current top emitter - and India still have relatively low per capita emissions, but Mr Trump said they shouldn’t be allowed to phase out fossil fuels more slowly than the US.
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The Beijing government is having difficulty persuading provincial leaders to abandon coal plants for which they have taken heavy loans.
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As extreme weather events alarm the world’s scientists, diplomats will meet in a few weeks in Chile to figure out the path ahead.