News Reporter: Fact Checker: What President Trump got wrong about the Paris accord on climate change

Friday 2 June 2017

Fact Checker: What President Trump got wrong about the Paris accord on climate change

Democracy Dies in Darkness

The truth behind the rhetoric

What President Trump got wrong about the Paris accord on climate change

President Trump announced on Thursday he will withdraw from the Paris Accord on climate change. The United States now joins only two countries — Nicaragua and Syria — in opposing the climate agreement that all other nations reached in 2015.

Trump’s speech was full of misstatements. Below are some of our fact-checks of his speech. See the full round-up here.

"We're getting out, but we will start to negotiate, and we will see if we can make a deal that's fair."

Each country set its own commitments under the Paris Accord, so Trump's comment is puzzling. He could unilaterally change the commitments offered by President Barack Obama, which is technically allowed under the Accord. But there is no appetite to renegotiate the entire agreement, as made clear by various statements from world leaders after his announcement.

"China will be allowed to build hundreds of additional coal plants. So, we can't build the plants, but they can, according to this agreement. India will be allowed to double its coal production by 2020."

This is false. The agreement is nonbinding and each nation sets its own targets. There is nothing in the agreement that stops the United States from building coal plants or gives the permission to China or India to build coal plants. In fact, market forces, primarily reduced costs for natural gas, have forced the closure of coal plants. China announced this year that it would cancel plans to build more than 100 coal-fired plants.

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"Compliance with the terms of the Paris accord and the onerous energy restrictions it has placed on the United States could cost America as much as 2.7 million lost jobs by 2025, according to the National Economic Research Associates."

These statistics are from a study funded by opponents of the Paris Accord. So the figures must be viewed with a jaundiced eye.

Moreover, the study assumed a scenario that no policy analyst expects — that the United States takes drastic steps to meet the Obama pledge of a 26 to 28 percent reduction in emissions by 2025. And the study did not consider possible benefits from reducing climate change, nor the net impact.

In the speech, Trump also said the "cost to the economy" would by nearly $3 trillion in lost gross domestic product by 2040. Over more than two decades, so "$3 trillion" amounts to a reduction of 6 percent. The study concludes coal usage would almost disappear, but innovation in clean energy sources would slow considerably, which also raises the cost of complying with the commitments.

Environmentalists say greater investment in clean energy will lower costs and spur innovation. That may not be correct either, but it demonstrates how the outcomes in models of economic activity decades from now depends on the assumptions.

"Believe me, we have massive legal liability if we stay in."

Trump is referring to concerns raised by White House counsel Don McGahn that staying in the Paris agreement would bolster legal arguments of climate advocates challenging Trump's decision to roll back the Clean Power Plan.

The plan proposes to cut carbon emissions from existing power plants 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. It is crucial to the United States meeting its carbon emissions reductions pledge in the Paris agreement. But it has been placed on hold while under litigation.

According to Politico, McGahn raised concerns that the Paris agreement "could be cited in court challenges to Trump's efforts to kill Obama's climate rules. McGahn's comments shocked State Department lawyers, who strongly reject both of those contentions, the sources said."

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Trump on NATO funding: Still misleading after months of fact checks

This month is Fact Checker’s two-year anniversary of fact-checking Donald Trump. Some politicians tweak their talking points if they’re found to be factually unsupported. But Trump rarely revises his debunked talking points — instead, he tends to double-down on them.

President Trump returned from his first foreign trip and continued to make inaccurate claims about the funding of NATO. In March 2016, we gave Three Pinocchios to a series of inaccurate statements he had made. As president, he is still regurgitating the same inaccurate campaign rhetoric.

Trump appears to now understand that NATO members are supposed to meet a 2 percent guideline, but he still consistently frames this as money that is owed to the United States or American taxpayers. But even if all NATO members suddenly met the guideline, no additional money would end up in the U.S. Treasury. So the president is being deeply misleading.

In March 2016, he was just a novice politician. But now that he’s president, he can order up briefings on any subject he wishes. Yet there appears to be little increase in his understanding of NATO funding. We increased the rating to Four Pinocchios.

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