Sen. Ted Cruz has urged President Donald Trump to fulfill a campaign promise and withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change in a CNN commentary on Tuesday.
Cruz argued that the agreement, which was signed by the Obama administration last year, not only would "reduce American job growth and wages and increase monthly utility costs for hardworking families, [it] would fundamentally disadvantage the United States in the global economy."
In addition, the agreement does not even meaningfully decrease global temperatures, he said.
The Texas senator said the deal, in any case, is not really about climate change, but "about increasing government control — over the economy, the energy sector and nearly every aspect of our daily lives. It represents the exact misguided, top-down, government-knows-best approach that American voters resoundingly rejected in 2016."
He also stressed the deal would put the United States "at a competitive disadvantage . . . because while the Obama administration irresponsibly committed America to immediate, real cuts in emissions, our global economic competitors would have no such handicap. In fact, Russia is permitted to increase its emissions approximately 50 percent and China and India have no meaningful cap on emissions until 2030."
Making matters worse, Cruz said the agreement "would damage America's national security as much as our economic security [by] pressuring our allies and partners, harming domestic job creators and materially reducing our prestige and influence in the process."
The senator also warned that reforming the deal would not go far enough, as opposed to completely withdrawing, because staying in the agreement "keeps the door open for future administrations to use it as means to impose more costly and ineffective energy regulations."
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