Former Secretary of State John Kerry said Friday that President Trump’s decision last year to withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement was one of the “single greatest acts of irresponsibility” ever committed by a U.S. president.
“For the president to stand up to the American people and say this is too much burden, we have to get out of Paris and withdraw America leadership from an issue that is life or death, is one of the single greatest acts of irresponsibility by a president of the United States anywhere at anytime,” Kerry said during a speech at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco, where about 4,000 city, state, business, and world leaders gathered to demonstrate their will to combat climate change.
All countries of the world except the U.S. under the Trump administration have committed to the Paris agreement, under which nations set their own nonbinding targets for reducing carbon emissions. Trump argued the U.S. committed too much compared with other countries.
Kerry, who helped negotiate the Paris agreement under President Barack Obama, accused Trump of making the decision to reject it without supporting facts or evidence.
“We have a president who without any knowledge of the issue, without any scientific fact whatsoever, lying to the American people about a burden to the United States, which is not a burden at all because no country accepted to do anything in Paris that was not within the capacity of that country to achieve,” he said Friday.
[Also read: Trump accuses John Kerry of undercutting administration’s ‘great work’]
The U.S. is on pace to meet two-thirds of the its carbon emissions reduction goals under the Paris agreement even without Trump.
Cities, states, the private sector, and market forces together will help slash carbon emissions to 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, according to a report presented Thursday by California Gov. Jerry Brown and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg at the Global Climate Action Summit.
That means, the report said, the U.S. is within “striking distance” — but will fall short — of meeting the Paris targets of lowering the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.
Reaching that level would help the world achieve the overarching goal of the Paris Agreement, limiting global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature at which many scientists say the world would see irreversible effects of climate change.
“I can tell you while Donald Trump may have pulled out of the Paris agreement, the American people have not,” Kerry said. But he warned collective action without the participation of the U.S. federal government is not enough.
“The danger is not that we won’t get there at some point in time,” Kerry said. “The danger is we aren’t going to get there in time.”
He expressed particular concern about countries such as China and India, and other developing nations, that continue to build coal plants to support their growing energy needs.
Industrialized nations pledged in 2009 to raise $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poor countries transition away from fossil fuels to combat climate change. But only $1 billion has actually been paid so far. Trump has canceled another $2 billion promised by the Obama administration.
“The president ought to be convening the G-20, locking the doors of the room, and making it clear nobody is going to leave until $100 billion is in the bank and we are helping small nations transition without having to build coal-fired plants,” Kerry said. “We should not build one more coal-fired power plant in the world.”
