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Trump’s EPA chief Scott Pruitt calls for an ‘exit’ to the Paris climate agreement

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Trump’s top environment official called for an “exit” from the historic Paris agreement Thursday in what appeared to be the first time such a high-ranking official has so explicitly disavowed the agreement endorsed by nearly 200 countries to fight climate change.

Speaking with “Fox & Friends,” Pruitt commented, “Paris is something that we need to really look at closely. It’s something we need to exit in my opinion.”

“It’s a bad deal for America,” Pruitt continued. “It was an America second, third, or fourth kind of approach. China and India had no obligations under the agreement until 2030. We front-loaded all of our costs.”

Pruitt had called the Paris accord a “bad deal” in the past but does not appear to have previously gone so far as to call for the United States to withdraw.

The Trump administration has previously said it is currently reviewing its position on climate change and energy policy and remains noncommittal, for now, on whether it will follow through on the president’s campaign pledge to “cancel” the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

“You might’ve read in the media that there was much discussion about U.S. energy policy and the fact that we’re undergoing a review of many of those policies,” Energy Secretary Rick Perry said in Texas on Thursday, according to prepared remarks. “It’s true, we are and it’s the right thing to do.”

Amid this uncertainty, the statement aligns Pruitt with a more hard-line approach held by some in the Trump administration, rather than the more moderate take of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who had said in his confirmation hearing that the U.S. should have a “seat at the table” in the Paris negotiations.

A more moderate approach to the Paris deal might involve modifying the United States’ pledge to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, rather than seeking to exit altogether.

The Obama administration had promised the world that the United States would reduce its emissions by 26 to 28 percent below its 2005 levels by the year 2025. The Trump administration could simply revise that pledge and make it less ambitious, and easier to attain.

In the energy sector, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have already declined by 14 percent from 2005 to 2016, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The reason is more burning of natural gas rather than coal and a growing profusion of renewables.

It is far from clear how the Trump administration could actually “exit” the Paris agreement, assuming that it wants to. Now that the agreement has entered into force, it takes three years under its terms for a party to withdraw, followed by a one-year waiting period – a length roughly equal to Trump’s first term in office.