President Donald Trump has announced that the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris climate agreement, but will begin negotiations to "re-enter either the Paris accord or an entirely new transaction."
Trump says during a White House Rose Garden announcement that the U.S. will exit the landmark climate agreement aimed at reducing carbon emissions to slow climate change.
Trump says the deal "disadvantages" the U.S. and is causing lost jobs and lower wages.
The announcement fulfills one of Trump's top campaign pledges. But it also undermines world efforts to combat global warming.
The U.S. had agreed under former President Barack Obama to reduce emissions to 26 percent to 28 percent of 2005 levels by 2025 -- about 1.6 billion tons.
Former President Barack Obama says the Trump administration is joining "a small handful of nations that reject the future" by withdrawing from the Paris climate change pact.
Obama is defending the deal that his administration painstakingly negotiated. He says the countries that stay in the Paris deal will "reap the benefits in "jobs and industries created." He says the U.S. should be "at the front of the pack."
The former president says in a statement that Trump's decision reflects "the absence of American leadership." But Obama says he's confident nonetheless that U.S. cities, states and businesses will fill the void by taking the lead on protecting the climate.
Obama says that businesses have chosen "a low-carbon future" and are already investing heavily in renewable sources like wind and solar.
U.S. Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) issued a statement supporting President Trump's move.
"The benefit of the Paris agreement was suspect from the start," said Sen. Johnson. "The Copenhagen Consensus used the UN’s own model to estimate the deal would reduce warming by at most 0.3 degrees by 2100."
"Instead of spending hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars to barely move the needle on global temperatures in a hypothetical distant future, the world’s limited resources would be better spent providing safe drinking water, preventing malaria, and taking other measures to alleviate human suffering in the here and now,” he said.
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