Paris Agreement on Global Warming: Donald Trump Dumps agreement as US Conservatives and Evangelicals applaud move

Noah Could Be Back In Business

Donald Trump has announced the withdrawal of the US from the global Paris agreement on climate change - in a huge blow to efforts to curb the effects of global warming. The president said he wants to "renegotiate" a "more fair" deal for the US with Democrats and other countries.

He added: "if we can get a deal, that's great. If not, that's fine."

Mr Trump, who had made pulling out of the pact - which has been signed by almost 200 nations - a central plank of his run for the presidency, said that in withdrawing he was "keeping his campaign promise to put American workers first".

He said he wants to talk to citizens of "Pittsburgh, not Paris" to cheers in the crowd of the Rose Garden at the White House.

The President had been put under extreme pressure by allies around the world to stay in the agreement, and though administration said his views on the subject were "evolving" - having previously claimed climate change was a "hoax" - Mr Trump refused to be backed into a corner.

He has said that the deal would hit the US coal industry hard and that it would prove "too costly" for US to stick to the Paris accord to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

But Mr Trump ignores the fact that new money in renewable energy outpaced new investments in fossil fuels for the first time in 2015 to the tune of $350bn.

Pulling out of the agreement outright would take four years under the standard cooling-off period for new international treaties - the route Mr Trump is likely to take, but he said that the US is out "as of today."

Note EU-Digest: Of the world's countries, the climate change denial industry is most powerful in the United States. 

The Koch brothers, industry advocates and libertarian think tanks, often in the United States. More than 90% of papers sceptical on climate change originate from right-wing think tanks.The total annual income of these climate change counter-movement-organizations is roughly $900 million.

Between 2002 and 2010, nearly $120 million (euro 136 million) was anonymously donated via the Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund to more than 100 organizations seeking to undermine the public perception of the science on climate change.. In 2013 the Center for Media and Democracy reported that the State Policy Network (SPN), an umbrella group of 64 U.S. think tanks, had been lobbying on behalf of major corporations and conservative donors to oppose climate change regulation.

Since the late 1970s, oil companies have published research broadly in line with the standard views on global warming. Despite this, oil companies organized a climate change denial campaign to disseminate public disinformation for several decades, a strategy that has been compared to the organized denial of the hazards of tobacco smoking by tobacco companies.

Also for millions of Americans evangelical Christians belief in the science of global warming is well below the national average.

Recent data from the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication suggests that while 64 percent of Americans think global warming is real and caused by human beings, only 44 percent of evangelicals do. 

Evangelicals in general, tend to be more politically conservative, and can be quite distrusting of scientists (believing, incorrectly, that they’re all a bunch of atheists). Plus, since some evangelicals really do go in for that whole “the world is ending” thing—not an outlook likely to inspire much care for the environment. 

EU-Digest