Americans put Donald Trump in the White House because for the previous eight years, the nation endured a president who cared more about appeasing European allies than he did taking care of people struggling at home. On the campaign trail, then-candidate Trump promised he would withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement and put U.S. workers first, reversing the destructive policy put into place by the Obama administration. President Trump, you must keep your promise.
The Paris Climate Agreement embodies everything wrong with former President Barack Obama’s polices. In Paris, Obama promised to impose a multitude of economy-crippling regulations, such as the Clean Power Plan and fuel-efficiency standards that continue to drive up the cost of energy in the United States and make it harder for U.S. businesses to compete against foreign competitors. Making matters even worse, Obama’s pledge has hurt American workers without providing any tangible environmental benefits.
According to an analysis from The Heritage Foundation, if the regulations proposed by Obama at Paris were enacted, it would result in the United States’ gross domestic product being reduced by $2.5 trillion by 2040, compared to what it would be without the regulations. This is the equivalent of wiping clean the economy for the entire State of California. The agreement would also result in 400,000 fewer jobs by 2035, 50 percent of which would be jobs in the manufacturing sector.
If the United States remains in the Paris Climate Agreement or something closely resembling it, the Rust Belt will continue to rust, and manufacturers in China and India will end up being the biggest beneficiaries. Under the Paris Climate Agreement, China and India are considered developing countries, which means these two nations are not bound to reduce their carbon-dioxide emissions. Instead, China has promised to “peak carbon dioxide emissions ‘around’ 2030.” However, it is doubtful China will actually follow through on this pledge, because China has a history of lying about its coal use. For example, in 2015, it was discovered China was burning 17 percent more coal than it had reported.
China will be tickled pink to see the United States shutter factories in the name of the Paris Climate Agreement, because as America closes its plants, China will continue to build more coal-fired power plants, reducing energy and manufacturing costs, which will result in more American jobs being sent overseas.
Not only will the agreement, which is not based on the most recently available scientific data, result in the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, it will do so while providing virtually zero environmental benefits. Even if the United States were to stop all its carbon-dioxide emissions—an idea that is pure fantasy, because oil, coal, and natural gas account for 81 percent of all the energy used in the United States, while wind and solar only generate 1.8 percent and 0.4 percent, respectfully—it would only avert 0.2 degrees C of warming by 2100, an amount too small to make a difference.
Furthermore, the entire foundation upon which the Paris Climate Agreement is based is fundamentally flawed. The agreement relies on computer-created climate model predictions, not actual temperature data collected by satellites. This would not be a problem if the models were accurate, but the average of 108 climate models used by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change overestimated the amount of warming that would occur by a factor of 2–3 degrees C over the past two decades, clearly showing they are woefully inadequate for predicting future global temperature.
Trump campaigned on the promise to put America first and exit the Paris Climate Agreement as soon as possible. This can be accomplished in as little as a year by withdrawing from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The Paris Climate Agreement embodies everything wrong with the Obama administration’s penchant for imposing costly policies that have caused thousands of people to lose their jobs and continues to put America last. Trump will not be president forever, so if he truly wants to be the champion of the American worker and American Industry, he must take this opportunity to exit the agreement. If he does not, he puts the country at risk, by handing future administrations a potent weapon to justify costly regulations on the U.S. economy that could last for decades.