President Donald Trump Still Won’t Commit To The Paris Agreement

Trump told leaders at the G7 group of nations in Italy on Saturday that he would make his decision over whether the United States continues to back the climate landmark agreement within the next week.

President Donald Trump is “wide open” on the Paris climate accord as “he takes in the pros and cons”, U.S. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis said in an interview to air Sunday.

“President Trump should join these leaders in protecting Americans from the mounting impacts of climate change and reaping the economic benefits of the clean energy revolution, rather than trying to shore up the flagging fortunes of the polluting coal and oil industries”, Meyer said.

“The whole discussion on the topic of climate was very hard, not to say very unsatisfactory”, Merkel said, as the two-day G7 summit of some of the world’s wealthiest nations in the seaside town of Taormina, Sicily, drew to a close.

But Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), one of Trump’s energy advisers and a fossil fuel industry ally, recently said that the USA should remain in the Paris Agreement in order to keep a seat at the global table and renegotiate the accord’s provisions.

During his campaign for the White House previous year, Trump promised that as president he would withdraw the US from the deal and reverse many of Obama’s climate change policies.

The president focused on fighting terrorism and increasing military spending in a speech to USA troops at a base in Sicily, Italy Saturday. The position makes the United States the lone holdout on endorsing the agreement during the G7 summit in Italy.

“He stands in stark isolation”, said Alden Meyer, who has followed climate talks for two decades as director of policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

However, there was relief that Trump agreed to language in the final G7 communique that pledged to fight protectionism and commits to a rules-based global trade system.

President Donald Trump will return to Washington having rattled some allies and reassured others, but his White House still sits under a cloud of scandal. “The United States, however, is undergoing a review process”.

Pulling out of the deal would arguably be the biggest unravel of Obama-era climate policies and may even cause the entire deal to collapse. It calls for reducing pollution in hopes of limiting global warming to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above temperatures at the outset of the industrial revolution. He hasn’t made an official decision yet, but if the president decides to pull out of the Paris Agreement that Obama signed in 2016, it could make things hard for Canada – although it won’t stop climate initiatives from going forward, according to a former Canadian diplomat. The issue has divided his closest advisers with a group of hard-liners including Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt and senior adviser Steve Bannon arguing for withdrawal.