4 Reasons Trump Was Right to Pull Out of the Paris Agreement

Nicolas Loris 

President Donald Trump has fulfilled a key campaign pledge, announcing that the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. The Paris Agreement, which committed the U.S. to drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions, was a truly bad deal—bad for American taxpayers, American energy companies, and every single American who depends on affordable, reliable energy. It was also bad for the countries that remain in the agreement. Here are four reasons Trump was right to withdraw. 1. The Paris Agreement was costly and ineffective.The Paris Agreement is highly costly and would do close to nil to address climate change. If carried out, the energy regulations agreed to in Paris by the Obama administration would destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs, harm American manufacturing, and destroy $2.5 trillion in gross domestic product by the year 2035...2. The agreement wasted taxpayer money. In climate negotiations leading up to the Paris conference, participants called for a Green Climate Fund that would collect $100 billion per year by 2020. The goal of this fund would be to subsidize green energy and pay for other climate adaptation and mitigation programs in poorer nations—and to get buy-in (literally) from those poorer nations for the final Paris Agreement. The Obama administration ended up shipping $1 billion in taxpayer dollars to this fund without authorization from Congress. Some of the top recipients of these government-funded climate programs have in the past been some of the most corrupt, which means corrupt governments collect the funds, not those who actually need it...more