Yale considering joining group committed to Paris climate accord

He knows the US has to be responsible with it.

Nobody at the White House seems to have asked President Donald Trump about his position on climate change. That message is likely to play well with Mr Trump’s Republican base, which reveled in defeating what Mr Pruitt called the “environmental left” and “climate exaggerators”.

Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre said despite the president’s decision, the mayors of many big American cities continue to support the accord.

“The president may have unwittingly added dynamism to the same actors that have always been the ones that are delivering the reductions to actually do more on their own”, he told AFP.

And each time, they didn’t get the answer they were looking for.

“I don’t think we’re going to change our ongoing efforts to reduce those emissions in the future either”, Tillerson said. “There’s enough to deal with with respect to the Paris agreement and making an informed decision about this important issue”, he said.

Pruitt, meanwhile, danced around the same question in response to repeated questioning from ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “That’s the discussion I’ve been having with the president, so that’s been my focus”. That he chose to go through with it anyway, combined with White House officials’ refusal to be transparent, implies that Trump’s personal opinion is at least somewhat relevant, if not significantly so.

“Do you know if President Trump still believes that climate change is a hoax?“.

The governor of Hawaii has also pledged to continue concrete steps to implement the Paris accord, while governors of Colorado, Minnesota, Oregon and Virginia committed to clean air and clean energy. He’s received awards as a businessman in that regard. “Measuring with precision, from my perspective, the degree of human contribution is very challenging”, Pruitt said.

“I am fighting every day for the great people of this country“.

Donald Trump, however, said that his administration would renegotiate either to re-enter the Paris accord or to have a new agreement “on terms that are fair to the United States, its businesses, its workers, its people, its taxpayers”.

“And now what are they going to do?” The treaties allow companies to sue a government in an ad hoc arbitration if they feel their rights have been violated, such as by a change in the legal basis they made their investment on.

Hal Brands, a professor of global affairs at JHU’s School of Advanced International Studies, is among 18 co-authors on a Foreign Policy article stating that “the decision will have serious, irreversible repercussions for the United States and the world”.

And they warned the United States would be hardest hit – economically and diplomatically by the fallout.

“We have taken significant steps to reduce our Carbon dioxide footprint”, he said.