US President Donald Trump defended his decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement on Sunday, calling it “unfair and biased,” even as his elected successor, Joe Biden, pledged to return to the agreement.
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The United States officially left, in early November, the Paris Climate Agreement signed in 2015 by 195 countries and which aims to contain the rise in temperatures below 2 degrees and to approach 1.5 degrees instead.
“I pulled the United States out of the unfair and one-sided Paris climate deal, a very unfair deal for the United States,” Trump said in a video released on the occasion of a G20 virtual summit organized by Saudi Arabia.
The environment is, along with the COVID-19 pandemic, on the menu of discussions at this two-day summit bringing together the world’s largest economies under the Saudi presidency.
“The Paris Agreement was not designed to save the environment. It was designed to kill the American economy, ”he blasted.
“I refuse to give up millions of American jobs and send billions of American dollars to the worst polluters and environmental offenders in the world,” insisted the American president, in an implicit reference to China, his commercial adversary.
Donald Trump, who championed the fossil fuel industry, challenged the science of climate change and weakened other environmental protection measures.
The US president, who refused to concede defeat in the recent election, gave one year’s notice to quit the Paris Agreement on November 4, 2019. But Joe Biden promised the United States would join the deal soon. his first day at the White House in January 2021, an initiative hailed by European leaders.
The US president-elect has proposed a $ 1,700 billion plan to bring the United States, the world’s second-largest emitter of CO2, to zero by 2050.
Despite the progress of the energy transition, the world is still on the path to 3.3 degrees warming by 2100, according to a report by the specialist research center BloombergNEF, published in late October.