Secretary of State John Kerry said in an interview on MSNBC on Thursday, that President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris Climate Accord “puts America last.”
“It is a shameful moment for the United States, to have unilaterally walked away from an agreement which did not have one other country requiring us to do something,” Kerry said.
“It was a voluntary program … The president was not truthful with the American people today, and the president who talked about putting America first, has now put America last.”
He claimed that Trump “is not helping the forgotten American,” Kerry said. “He is hurting them. Their kids will have worse asthma in the summer. They will have a harder time having economic growth. He’s made us an environmental pariah in the world, and I think it is one of the most self-destructive moves I’ve ever seen by any president in my lifetime.”
However, things seem to be little different, as Daniel Simmons, the vice president for policy at the Institute for Energy Research stated, “Air quality has been increasing, pollution has been decreasing, things are getting better and asthma’s getting worse,” Simmons said. “You have this disconnect.”
- Sterling Burnett, a research fellow in climate and energy issues for The Heartland Institute, noted in a recent article that, “Numerous studies, including a NERA Economic Consulting report cited in Trump’s announcement, showed meeting the carbon-dioxide targets imposed on the United States under the Paris agreement would force the premature closing of many of the nation’s least-expensive power plants. NERA estimated meeting the nation’s obligations under the agreement would cost the U.S. economy nearly $3 trillion, and by 2040, the United States would have lost 6.5 million industrial-sector jobs, including 3.1 million manufacturing jobs.”
