Former COP21 head calls US decision to leave deal a ‘major error’

Paris — US President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord is "shameful" and a "major error", France’s Laurent Fabius, who helped to negotiate 2015 deal, said on Friday.

"This decision, this speech, is a shameful mistake, a major error," Fabius, the former head of the COP21, the UN’s climate forum, told France 2 television. He condemned the "lies" put forward on the subject by Trump.

"The only reaction is world mobilisation, that is what must be done."

Fabius, then French foreign minister, played a key role in sealing the historic deal in Paris in December 2015 under which 195 states pledged to curb greenhouse-gas emissions to keep global warming to under 2°C over pre-industrial levels.

He stepped down as president of COP21 in February 2016.

Trump will never "destroy the Paris accord" which "was the best compromise possible", Fabius said.

Trump announced on Thursday that the US would withdraw from the "bad" Paris accord, but would first seek to renegotiate the deal.

"I cannot, in good conscience, support a deal that punishes the US," he said, decrying the "draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country".

Fabius responded that "it is a completely false vision to believe that it would be positive for the US to withdraw from the Paris accord.… The creation of jobs in the fields of green energy will be greater than the job cuts in the obsolete sectors.

"He has an extraordinary arrogance this Mr Trump. He says, ‘I have a different opinion from the others, so all the others have to renegotiate.’ But that does not exist. A renegotiation is out of question."

AFP