Donald Trump seems to have warmed up positively as he aims to replace Barrack Obama in the Oval office come January 20th, 2017.
A source on his transition team said that Trump is seeking quick ways to withdraw the United States from a global accord to combat climate change.
Trump has previously described climate change as a hoax. USA withdrawal now would be before the standard four-year period provided in the treaty.
The Reuters’ source said he could do that by issuing a presidential order deleting the US signature from the accord.
“There wouldn’t be this diplomatic fallout on the broader international agenda if Obama hadn’t rushed the adoption,” the source told Reuters. “It was reckless for the Paris agreement to enter into force before the election.”
The Paris treaty came into force on 4 November, four days before the election, having been signed by 109 countries responsible for 76 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The US alone is responsible for 18 per cent.
Since Trump’s victory last week, countries from across the world – including China – reaffirmed their support for the agreement, which seeks to phase out fossil fuels by mid-century and aims to limit the rise of global temperatures to less than 2℃ compared to pre-industrial times.
“It was reckless for the Paris agreement to enter into force before the election,” said the source, who works on Trump’s transition team for international energy and climate policy, speaking on condition of anonymity, according to Reuters. The Paris agreement went into force on 4 November, four days before last Tuesday’s election.
Negative impacts
According to former Irish President and human rights advocate Mary Robinson, the US withdrawal from the climate change treaty would negatively affect the lives of American people in the first place.
“It would be a tragedy for the United States and the people of the United States if the US becomes a kind of rogue country, the only country in the world that is somehow not going to go ahead with the Paris Agreement,” Robinson told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on Sunday.
“The moral obligation of the United States as a big emitter – and a historically big emitter that built its whole economy on fossil fuels that are now damaging the world – it’s unconscionable the United States would walk away from it.”
“Clearly they’re hurting at the moment,” she said. “But it’s not a future to go backward into coal and have higher emissions in the United States. The impact of that will be felt by poor communities and poor countries all over the world.”