Report: Trump told confidants he plans to keep his campaign pledge to pull out of Paris climate accords

In keeping with the “America First” theme that helped propel him to the White House, President Donald J. Trump has informed confidants that he intends to pull the United States out of the Paris “climate” accords, keeping a major campaign pledge.

According to Axios, which cited three sources, several people have been informed of Trump’s decision, including Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt, who was not a fan of the accord and has been out in front publicly denouncing the agreement as harmful to U.S. businesses and jobs.

In public, Trump has not yet officially made up his mind, having tweeted on Saturday while in Italy that he would make a decision whether to stay in the accord or extract the U.S. from it this week.

When asked about this, Director of Strategic Communications Hope Hicks told Axios, “I think his tweet was clear. He will make a decision this week.” (Related: Read FAKE SCIENCE: “Global warming” world map data largely faked by NOAA… climate change fraud rapidly unraveling.)

I will make my final decision on the Paris Accord next week!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 27, 2017

The news site reflected on why Trump’s alleged decision to leave the accords matters:

Pulling out of Paris is the biggest thing Trump could do to unravel Obama’s climate policies. It also sends a stark and combative signal to the rest of the world that working with other nations on climate change isn’t a priority to the Trump administration. And pulling out threatens to unravel the ambition of the entire deal, given how integral former President Obama was in making it come together in the first place.

Yes, about that: Obama ensured that American businesses and workers would suffer mightily under the accord’s onerous new rules and regulations — as if Obamacare, Dodd-Frank and a raft of additional red tape from a dozen other federal agencies didn’t do enough to kill opportunities while he was president. And it’s not even as if the accord would accomplish its stated goal of reducing global temperatures: A key report even found that the accord was too weak to achieve those goals.

Also, as noted by 22 GOP senators in a letter to Trump that includes Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, under current U.S. clean water statutes, the president will be unable to fulfill another key policy objective — getting rid of the Obama EPA’s Clean Power Plan regulations that would see major closures of U.S. power plants, higher energy costs and more job losses if left in place.

“One of the most important executive orders you signed is EO 13783, Promoting Energy Independence and Economic Growth, wherein, among other things, you instruct the [EPA] to unwind President Obama’s Clean Power Plan regulations,” said the letter. (Related: Read OMB Director Mulvaney says climate change research ‘a waste of your money’.)

“A key risk to fulfilling this objective is remaining in the Paris Agreement. Because of existing provisions within the Clean Air Act and others embedded in the Paris Agreement, remaining in it would subject the United States to significant litigation risk that could upend your Administration’s ability to fulfill its goal of rescinding the Clean Power Plan. Accordingly, we encourage you to make a clean break from the Paris Agreement,” the letter continued.

As noted by Axios there are three ways Trump can make that break, if in fact he has already decided to do so:

1. Declare the agreement a treaty — not an “executive agreement” as Obama tried to claim — and send it to the Senate for approval, as required by the Constitution. At this juncture there is little-to-no chance it would garner the required two-thirds majority necessary for ratification, and a year from now the U.S. would no longer be part of it.
2. Simply announce the U.S. was pulling out, which means we’d remain part of the agreement until 2020. Under the agreement’s provisions, no country can pull out for three years, and the agreement just took effect in November; it would still take a year to extract ourselves completely.
3. Withdraw the U.S. from the treaty that buttresses the Paris Accords, which is the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. But Trump is not likely to do that because it would pull the U.S. out of all climate diplomacy.

Keep up with this story as it develops on ClimateScienceNews.com.

J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for NaturalNews.com and NewsTarget.com, as well as editor of The National Sentinel.

Sources include:

Axios.com

NYTimes.com

FakeScience.news