Justifying United States' withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord, President Donald Trump on Tuesday said that the agreement would have required Washington to support the efforts of developing countries like India and China towards fighting climate change.
Speaking at the Economic Club of New York, Trump deemed the Paris accord "one-sided" and "economically unfair".
"And it (the agreement) is so unfair. It doesn't kick in for China until 2030. Russia goes back into the 1990s, where the base year was the dirtiest year ever in the world. India, we are supposed to pay them money because they are a developing nation. I said, "We're a developing nation, too," Trump said, to laughter from the audience.
"Some of the other countries like China, like India, like Russia, like many other countries that absolutely are doing absolutely nothing to clean up their smokestacks and clean up all of their plants and all of the garbage that they're dropping in the sea and that floats into Los Angeles," he added.
Trump in June too had passed the buck to India and China for not doing enough on climate change.
Notably, German Chancellor Angela Merkel during her visit to India earlier this month lauded New Delhi for its work in the field of renewable energy.
"We intend to work very closely on sustainable development and climate protection. There are many areas both in environmental like waste management pure water and climate issues. India has rather low CO2 footprints. The future industrial development, of course, needs to be as sustainable as possible. 74 GW of renewable energy is here in India and that something that you have reiterated and moved forward. I can congratulate you on that part," Merkel had said.
In September, Union Minister for Environment and climate change Prakash javadekar addressing the 14th Conference of Parties (COP14) to United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) in India had underlined that the nation has already achieved half of its renewable energy production target.
The Indian government plans to achieve 175GW of renewable energy capacity by 2022 as part of its climate commitments. India currently has an installed renewable energy capacity of around 80 gigawatts.
The Paris Climate Accord was adopted on December 12, 2015, by 196 parties around the world. It seeks to curb global warming to a maximum of two degrees by 2100 by instigating pledges to cut carbon dioxide and other emissions created through the burning of fossil fuels.
Under the Paris Agreement, each country determines plans and regularly reports its own contribution it should make in order to mitigate global warming. There is no mechsm to force a country to set a specific target by a specific date, but each target should go beyond previously set targets.
US President Donald Trump and his advisors have described the historic 2015 climate change mitigation agreement - a cornerstone of the foreign policy legacy of former US President Barack Obama - as weak, particularly with regard to providing incentives to polluters in India and China to lower emissions, while concurrently being too hard on US industry.
( With inputs from ANI )