Channeling Charleton Heston at the end of Planet of the Apes: “You finally really did it. You maniacs! You blew it up!” President Trump made good on his campaign promise to pull America out of the Paris accord, the landmark international agreement forged in 2015 among nearly 200 nations to reduce their carbon pollution in order to combat climate change. Trump broke the historic treaty despite strong scientific consensus for the need for climate action and overwhelming corporate and citizen support for our country to keep its commitment to lower its carbon pollution and its effect on a warming world. Instead, the president who wrongly believes climate change to be “a Chinese hoax,” and favors fossil fuel interests, has decided to abandon U.S. leadership on the issue and join only two other countries—Syria and Nicaragua—in opposition to the Paris climate agreement.
The official rationale put forward by the White House is that the agreement costs the United States trillions of dollars and millions of jobs over several decades—based on an industry-funded analysis that has been widely debunked. The reality is that the vehemently anti-science Trump administration is more than willing to undercut the growing clean energy economy and condemn the planet to a climate catastrophe, all for the sake of polluter profits.
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