One year after pledging to “cancel” the Paris climate agreement, Trump will attend global warming summit Friday
Trump sure is flip-flopping over to the left at record speed.
Exactly one year after pledging in a speech to “cancel” the Paris climate agreement, President Trump will attend a Group of Seven summit Friday in Sicily where he’s expected to come under sustained pressure from his counterparts to reverse course.
The White House said earlier this month that Trump would only announce his decision after attending the summit, but the governments of the other six major industrialized countries – Canada, Japan, Britain, Germany, France and Italy – are anxious for an answer.
Five of those countries’ leaders are meeting with the president at Thursday’s NATO meeting in Brussels, but it will be at the G7 summit that the climate issue is expected to take center stage.
“I am trying to convince doubters. There is still work to do,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a multinational climate meeting in Berlin on Tuesday, without mentioning the United States or Trump by name.
“We all feel the impacts of climate change,” she said. “We are responsible for each other, we are liable for each other, we share a common destiny.”
Other G7 leaders also are strong supporters of the climate agreement, and new French President Emmanuel Macron in particular has emphasized his intention to try to get Trump to reconsider. While campaigning for the presidency, Macron posted an online message to U.S. climate scientists inviting them to “come to France” and work on innovation and climate technologies there.
The ambitious agreement struck at the U.N.’s “COP21” climate conference near the French capital in late 2015 aims to prevent average temperatures from rising more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, to stave off what advocates warn could be potentially catastrophic effects on the planet.
Obama committed the U.S. to cut emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming by 26-28 percent below the levels they were at in 2005, by the year 2025.
But a year ago on Friday, GOP candidate Trump delivered an energy policy speech in North Dakota in which he vowed to “cancel the Paris climate agreement and stop all payments of U.S. tax dollars to U.N. global warming programs.”
He accused President Obama of backing an accord that “gives foreign bureaucrats control over how much energy we use right here in America.”
