WASHINGTON — American Energy Alliance President Thomas Pyle has issued the following statement regarding President Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement:
“President Trump has a very clear vision of making this country a champion of energy development and economic progress. Withdrawing from the Paris Agreement reinforces his commitement to that vision and the American Energy Alliance applauds him for doing so.
“The Paris Agreement was a bad deal from the start. It committed the U.S. to unilateral economic disarmament by saddling the economy with unnecessary regulations and would have driven energy costs sky-high for American families. Further, U.S. taxpayers would be on the hook for billions of dollars to subsidize green energy projects around the world.”
“By keeping his promise to cancel our involvement, President Trump has taken another positive step toward resetting a generation of failed energy and environmental policies. Withdrawing from the Paris deal signals to the world that America is committed to economic prosperity at home and lifting millions of people out of energy poverty abroad.”
Projections run by NERA Economic Consulting show that the Paris Agreement’s concomitant regulations would result in staggering losses. In NERA’s core scenario, the U.S. GDP loss would be about $250 billion in 2025 and increase to about $420 billion per year on average. The cumulative loss would be about $4 trillion between 2022 and 2031. NERA reports that, “The losses become larger in the long run as the ‘mid-term’ deep decarbonization target constrains the economy significantly. The U.S. economy could lose about 6% of its GDP on average between 2034 and 2040 amounting to a loss of greater than $2 trillion annually and a cumulative loss of $14 trillion.”
Meeting our so-called nationally determined contribution of a 28 percent reduction in net greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 2025 would have required inundating our economy with a flood of new and heightened regulations. Estimates by the Heritage Foundation hold that the agreement would have cost the United States an overall average shortfall of nearly 400,000 jobs, an average manufacturing shortfall of over 200,000 jobs, a total income loss of more than $20,000 for a family of four, an aggregate GDP loss of over $2.5 trillion, and an increase of between 13 and 20 percent on the average household electricity bill.
###