While Trumps America isolates itself, Europe and China forge new climate partnership
On Friday, less than a day after President Donald Trump announced the United States would leave the Paris climate agreement, China and the European Union reaffirmed their commitment to implementing the agreement’s goals.
“The EU and China consider climate action and the clean energy transition an imperative more important than ever,” the 28 EU countries and China said in a joint statement. The countries will “significantly intensify their political, technical, economic, and scientific cooperation on climate change and clean energy."
The announcement marks one of the few joint statements between China and the European Union. It also marks a turning point from American global leadership. The 2015 Paris agreement was widely seen as a foreign policy win for the United States and the Obama administration, which had spent years laying the groundwork for a global pact, particularly through bilateral agreements with China and India. The agreement is famously flexible, and lets the industrialized world off with little more than a slap on the wrist for over a hundred years of disproportionate pollution.
Trump, in announcing that the United States would leave the agreement, said it was “bad,” and would cost the country in GDP. Economists and analysts who study the cost of climate change, and the truly terrifying outcomes of not acting to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, have found that the agreement would likely save the world an enormous amount of money, as well as preventing an untold toll in human life and well-being.
https://thinkprogress.org/eu-china-paris-in-us-out-e9c8390fd780
