The Obama administration sent a thinly veiled warning to Republican presidential candidates on Thursday by saying there would be dire consequences if the next president pulls out of last year’s global climate deal.
President Obama’s lead climate negotiator, Todd Stern, said there would be significant “blowback” and “diplomatic consequences” if the next president pulled the U.S. out of the deal agreed in Paris last December. The non-binding deal places the U.S. and nearly 200 other countries on the path to emissions reductions.
Stern, speaking to reporters in London, made a comparison between former President George W. Bush pulling the U.S. out of the Kyoto Protocol, a climate deal struck during the presidency of Bill Clinton.
“There is a record there that you can look at to have a pretty good sense that there would be diplomatic consequences,” he said from London. “There was a lot of blowback that the U.S. got, generally, diplomatically across the range of diplomatic concerns, and I have no doubt that it would be very significant if the U.S. were to do that with regard to Paris, probably much, much more significant than what happened before,” he said, according to news reported by BBC.
