Bill Clinton on Trump’s Paris decision: ‘We owe our children more’

Former President Bill Clinton on Thursday criticized President Trump’s decision to remove the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement, saying, “We owe our children more.”

“Walking away from Paris treaty is a mistake,” Clinton tweeted. “Climate change is real. We owe our children more. Protecting our future also creates more jobs.”

Walking away from Paris treaty is a mistake. Climate change is real. We owe our children more. Protecting our future also creates more jobs.

— Bill Clinton (@billclinton) June 1, 2017

Trump on Thursday said he will formally withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate accord, an Obama-era pact that includes nearly 200 nations.

“In order to fulfill my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens, the United States will withdraw from the Paris climate accord,” he said at the White House Rose Garden.

{mosads}“The bottom line is that the Paris accord is very unfair at the highest level to the United States. We are getting out, but we will start to negotiate and we will if we can make a deal that is fair.”

Trump is skeptical of the science behind climate change, and Thursday’s decision is his latest rollback of former President Barack Obama’s policies. The Obama administration led negotiations surrounding the nonbinding climate pact in 2015.

Obama said Thursday that Trump’s rejection of the accord places the U.S. among “a small handful of nations that reject the future.”

“The nations that remain in the Paris agreement will be the nations that reap the benefits in jobs and industries created,” he said in a statement.

The agreement consisted of individual greenhouse gas limits that each signatory nation determined for itself.

Obama pledged that the U.S., currently the world’s No. 2 emitter, would cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 26 percent to 28 percent by 2025.