Donald Trump's vow to cancel the
Paris climate agreement is as foolish as telling "sovereign leaders around the world 'you're fired,'" President Barack Obama's former international climate negotiator says.
"This particular promise caught my attention, since I led the U.S. negotiating team in Paris and in the seven years leading up to that agreement," Todd Stern, the U.S. special envoy for climate change from 2009 to last April, writes in an opinion piece for
The Washington Post.
"The United States has no power to cancel it," Stern wrote. "This isn't reality TV. You can't tell sovereign leaders around the world 'you're fired,' and you can't tell them a multilateral agreement they just entered is canceled."
Trump has argued the agreement last December between Obama and other world leaders to work together to limit greenhouse gas emissions amounts to "foreign bureaucrats" having control over domestic energy use — a view Stern calls "ludicrous."
"Under the Paris Agreement, no foreigner, from bureaucrat to king, gains an iota of control over U.S. decisions about how much energy we use or, indeed, what our overall energy or climate policy is," he writes.
Stern notes Trump could "in theory" pull the United States out of pact, "but that would be stunningly misguided," warning "it's time to take Trump seriously."
"If a President Trump were to stick to his wrongheaded notion that climate change is a hoax, and unilaterally withdraw from the Paris Agreement, he would also inflict severe diplomatic damage on the United States," he writes.
"U.S. standing in the world would plummet amid almost universal condemnation. Trump could pound his chest to his heart's content, but he'd come out of this rash exercise a loser, with U.S. credibility and leverage in tatters."
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