President Trump won’t be able to keep the United States out of the Paris climate agreement forever, French President Emmanuel Macron predicted Wednesday.
“I am sure, one day, the United States will come back and join the Paris Agreement,” Macron said during an address to a joint session of Congress.
That prediction, with its pointed rebuke of one of the major foreign policy decisions of Trump’s first year in office, thrilled Democrats, who gave the line loud applause. Macron, who has otherwise tried to foster a warm relationship with Trump on his state visit to Washington, D.C. didn’t hesitate to highlight disagreements over climate policy with a flourish.
“With business leaders and local communities, let us work together in order to make our planet great again and create new jobs and new opportunities while safeguarding our earth,” he said, in a revision of Trump’s famous campaign slogan.
Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate deal in June, just months after former President Barack Obama entered the pact.
“The agreement is a massive redistribution of United States wealth to other countries,” Trump said when announcing the decision. “The Paris Agreement handicaps the United States economy in order to win praise from the very foreign capitals and global activists that have long sought to gain wealth at our country’s expense. They don’t put America first.”
There’s been speculation that he might reconsider that decision, perhaps when the United States hosts the G7 summit in 2020. “The president theoretically could walk out of the meeting with heads of state and say that he had renegotiated the Paris Agreement,” George David Banks, a former Trump advisor, said in February.
Macron said that the United States, France, and other major nations have no choice but to transition to a low-carbon economy.
“What is the meaning of our life if our decision, our conscious decision, is to reduce the opportunities for our children or our grandchildren?” he said during the joint address. “By polluting the oceans, not mitigating CO2 emissions, and destroying our biodiversity, we are killing our planet. Let us face it: there is no Planet B.”
