'Trump's climate claims on China, India false'

Washington DC (USA): US President Donald Trump wrongly claimed that the Paris Agreement would leave India and China unchecked on building coal-fired power plants, an American web-based fact checking media outlet has said.

Lori Robertson, managing editor of FactCheck.org which is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Centre, said there was nothing in the Paris agreement that stipulates which countries can and cannot buildcoal plants.

“Trump wrongly claimed that the Paris Agreement would allow China to ‘build hundreds of additional coal plants’ and allow India to ‘double its coal production by 2020’ but the United States ‘can’t build the plants’,” said Robertson.

Announcing his decision to withdraw from the Paris deal, Trump had alleged that India and China have been left accountable in the agreement.

“While the United States is held to a higher standard than developing countries, the two he mentioned — China and India — have agreed to climate measures that would preclude a major expansion of coal. And perhaps most important, new coal plants in the US aren’t economically feasible right now, due to lower costs of other forms of energy,” Robertson said.

He said under the Paris deal, developed countries agreed to set economy-wide reductions in greenhouse gas emissions while developing countries “should continue enhancing their mitigation efforts” with the aim of achieving economy-wide absolute reductions eventually.