Cruz: I would pull US out of Paris climate deal

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is promising, if elected president, to pull the United States out of the nonbinding climate change accord that nearly 200 countries agreed to earlier this month.

Cruz, a GOP presidential candidate, on Tuesday told reporters in Tennessee that the agreement is part of an extreme focus on climate by President Obama.

{mosads}“Barack Obama seems to think the SUV parked in your driveway is a bigger threat to national security than radical Islamic terrorists who want to kill us. That’s just nutty,” he said, according to The Washington Post.

“These are ideologues, they don’t focus on the facts, they won’t address the facts, and what they’re interest[ed in] instead is more and more government power.”

The agreement is the first pact in which the world’s developing countries joined with richer ones in promising to cut emissions.

Obama said the United States would reduce its greenhouse gases 26 percent to 28 percent by 2025, though the target is not legally binding, nor is any country’s target in the deal.

Cruz is one of the most skeptical candidates on climate change, refusing to grant even that the world is warming, let alone endorse the scientific consensus that human activity is the main cause of it.

He repeated his contention that global temperatures have not risen for 18 years, calling it “an inconvenient truth” for climate activists, a reference to the title of former Vice President Al Gore’s documentary on global warming.

Cruz chaired a hearing to that effect earlier in December, in which he railed against “global-warming alarmists” who do not like that the world has stopped heating up and called them part of a “climate-industrial complex.”

The warming “pause” has been refuted by recent research, including a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration study published this summer that examined a wider range of data than the data set that found a pause.