Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross was a special guest on Friday’s Breitbart News Daily, where he defended President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accords and discussed its economic ramifications.
“I think the economic case is quite clear,” said Secretary Ross. “This was a terrible business deal that was engineered, not on behalf of the U.S.’s best interests.”
“This was a deal that would have cost the economy $3 trillion over the next several decades. By 2040, our economy would have lost six-and-a-half million industrial sector jobs – almost half of which, 3.1 million, were in the manufacturing sector. That doesn’t make any sense to me,” he said.
“It also doesn’t make sense that we were scheduled to put out a lot of money up front, but meanwhile, China would be able to increase its emissions every year for the next 13 years,” he continued. “That’s not a balanced arrangement. India made their participation contingent on receiving billions of dollars in foreign aid from developed countries. That’s not a balanced thing, either.”
“It makes no sense as an economic deal. This is sloganeering in its worst fashion,” he declared.
SiriusXM host Joel Pollak brought up the argument from critics of Trump’s decision, such as California Gov. Jerry Brown, that withdrawing from the Paris accords will eliminate a large number of “green” jobs.
Ross responded by noting the figures on job losses due to the Paris accords “are net of whatever gains there might have been in green power.”
“The reality is, in a lot of green power, particularly the solar, a lot of those jobs are, in fact, being created in China, not here,” he said. “It’s really a question of where are you creating jobs, not so much of are you creating them.”
“The fact is, our CO2 emissions have declined by 12 percent since 2006 – not so much to do with anything that the Obama administration did, but simply due to the development of liquefied natural gas, which is a relatively low-pollution, relatively low-cost solution to generating energy,” he noted.
Ross said it was predictable Europeans would be upset that the United States withdrew from an agreement that placed such a lopsided burden on America.
“It doesn’t surprise me that they’re angry that we pulled out because they were getting a relatively free ride out of the U.S.,” he said. “If someone was getting a free ride and now he no longer is, naturally, he’s going to be angry about that. So that doesn’t surprise me at all.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.