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Fact-Checking the Trump Administration's Climate Change Statements

President Trump's announcement last week that he will withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement was not unexpected. Besides the fact that the news was leaked to the press a day in advance, Trump has been promising to do this since he was on the campaign trail. But Trump’s blatant disregard for climate science and his description of the Paris Agreement, itself, has drawn criticism from the science community.

Phil Duffy, president of Woods Hole Research Center, says the president’s deicision is based on assumptions that are “either demonstrably incorrect or at least highly questionable.” He set the record straight on three key points:

The Paris Agreement doesn’t punish the U.S., and it can’t be renegotiated:

 “The way the agreement works is that every party – that is, every country – to the agreement, independently decides what it can do in terms of reducing its emissions of greenhouse gases, and then that constitutes its commitment under the agreement. So, our commitment was not negotiated. It was determined, unilaterally, by the United States. And if the president does feel that it’s too difficult for us to meet that commitment, it’s not only not necessary, it’s not even possible to renegotiate our commitment. But he can simply change it at any time.”  

 

The world is on track for dangerous climate change, and the Paris Agreement would significantly reduce the amount of warming expected by 2100:

“Part of the way the agreement works is that countries are expected to make stronger commitments every five years. So it is actually, at this point, not possible to know the full effects of the Paris climate agreement, because that depends on future commitments made by the parties. So all of these discussions are looking at the effects of only the initial round of commitments, not the full effect of the commitments that will be made in the future.”  

The “lost jobs” study Trump cited has been widely criticized for its methodology, and a growing number of studies show that climate policies don’t hurt the economy.  

“We actually have enough experience with real world climate policies (cap and trade systems, carbon taxes – some in the U.S., and many more abroad) that we can actually begin to learn about the economic effects of climate policies, not from trying to predict the future but from actually looking at what the experience has been. … The retrospective studies that have been done of the actual economic impacts of climate policies have shown either no detectable effect or actually positive economic impacts.” 

What’s more, Duffy says the study Trump cited didn’t take into effect the enormous economic costs of climate change, from extreme weather damage to health care impacts.

Read Woods Hole Research Center’s full fact-check here:

Top Ten Inaccurate or Confusing Statements in Trump’s Paris Agreement Speech

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