U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that the United States "could conceivably" return to the Paris Climate Accord, which sets out a global action plan to avoid dangerous climate change by limiting global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius.
At a press conference with visiting Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg, President Trump criticized the deal the U.S. had signed up for in the Paris Agreement.
"I will say that the Paris Agreement, as drawn and as we signed, was very unfair to the United States. It put great penalties on us. It made it very difficult for us to deal in terms of business. It took away a lot of our asset values," President Trump said.
"It treated the United States very unfairly and frankly, it's an agreement that I have no problem with, but I had a problem with the agreement that they signed," he added.
"So we could conceivably go back in," President Trump said, without elaborating or directly answering a reporter's question as to what could persuade the U.S. to stay in the Paris Accord.
"The Paris accord really would have taken away our competitive edge, and we're not going to let that happen, I'm not going to let this happen," President Trump said.
When he announced last year the U.S. withdrawal from the global pact to limit climate change, President Trump left the door open to negotiating "a fair deal" for the U.S.
"The United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord…but begin negotiations to reenter either the Paris Accord or a really entirely new transaction on terms that are fair to the United States, its businesses, its workers, its people, its taxpayers. So we're getting out. But we will start to negotiate, and we will see if we can make a deal that's fair. And if we can, that's great. And if we can't, that's fine," President Trump said in June 2017.
Three months later, some top U.S. Administration officials, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, said that the U.S. could stay in the Paris Accord under the right conditions.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
More Top Reads From Oilprice.com:
Tsvetana is a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing for news outlets such as iNVEZZ and SeeNews. More