Paris climate deal benefitting 'only' India and China: Trump

Washington D.C. [USA], Feb 25 (ANI): United States President Donald Trump has said that developing countries like India and China are benefitting from the Paris Climate Agreement, while the pact only leashed the economic growth of his country.

He said that the developing countries benefited the most from the Paris Agreement while the US did not get any "advantage", according to media reports.

"We knocked out the Paris Climate Agreement. It would have been a disaster. Would have been a disaster for our country," Trump said in his address on Friday to the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC).

Arguing that countries like China and India were benefiting the most from the Paris Agreement, and was unfair to the US Trump said, "You know, basically. You have a lot of oil and gas that we found you know, technology has been amazing. And we found things that we never knew. But we have massive energy reserves."

"We have coal. We have so much. And basically, they were saying, don't use it. You can't use it. So what it does is it makes us uncompetitive with other countries. It's not going to happen, I told them. It's not going to happen," he added.

Trump was referring to his decision to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement last year.

Commenting on India and other countries, he said, "Other countries like India, China and others, we had to pay, because they (agreement) considered them a growing country. But the United States? We're developed. We can pay."

"And China, their agreement didn't kick in until 2030. Right? Our agreement kicks in immediately. And Russia, they're allowed to go back into the 1990s, which was not a clean environmental time," Trump asserted.

The Paris Climate Agreement is an agreement within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) dealing with greenhouse gas emissions mitigation, adaptation and finance starting in the year 2020.

The language of the agreement was negotiated by representatives of 196 parties at the 21st Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC in Paris and adopted by consensus on December 12, 2015.

As of September 2017, 195 UNFCCC members have signed the agreement, out of which 162 of them have ratified it.

The Paris Agreement aims to respond to the global climate change threat by keeping a global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels in the 21st century.

In June last year, Trump had announced to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement on climate change and renegotiate the deal that was agreed upon by over 190 countries during the previous Obama administration.

According to Trump, he stated that it will undermine the US economy and will put the country at a permanent disadvantage and would affect American businesses and workers. (ANI)