“Something could happen with respect to the Paris accord,” Trump said at a joint news conference with Macron on Thursday. “We’ll see what happens.”

Trump Wants More Coal Plants as a Solution to Global Warming!

Did Macron offer Trump a bag of coal to endorse the Paris accords?

The U.S. already donated $1 billion to the UN  Green Climate Fun.  A White House official said the  U.S. is commuted to “work closely with other countries to help them access and use fossil fuels more cleanly and efficiently.”  Financial support for the Green Climate Fund was seen as a critical tool to win broad support for the global carbon-cutting pact. Former President Barack Obama pledged $3 billion for the initiative, though he only provided a third of that before leaving the White House.

(Abstracted from the Spokesman Review) Trump has made clear the U.S. won’t be sending any more checks to the fund as long as he is president, but the U.S. gets to keep a seat on the managing board for a year or more based on that previous $1 billion contribution. The board, which includes a U.S. official and 23 other members with veto power, has so far approved more than three dozen projects — including modernizing a hydropower project in Tajikistan and barriers around an island in the South Pacific.

Under Trump, the U.S. wants to encourage developing countries to build high-efficiency coal plants, “clean coal” plants that employ carbon-capture technology to strip out even more, the White House official said.

Activists said the Trump administration’s objective runs counter to the fund’s entire mission.

“This is not supposed to be a coal slush fund or a natural gas slush fund,” said Karen Orenstein, the deputy director of the economic policy program at Friends of the Earth. “This is a fund about sustainable development in the age of climate crisis.”  John Coequyt, global climate policy director at the Sierra Club, said the idea of using funds meant to aid countries facing the worst consequences of the climate crisis to build new coal plants was tantamount to “taking the fire department’s budget and using it to pour gasoline on the blaze.”

“The U.S. under Trump might want the Green Climate Fund to fund climate change, but there are other countries that actually take the climate crisis seriously, and they’re not going to let the Green Climate Fund be used for Trump’s climate-denying, justice-denying agenda,” Orenstein said.

The U.S. advocacy is in line with Trump’s stated goal of American “energy dominance,” with U.S. coal, oil and gas helping to supply the world’s power needs. “We will export American energy all over the world, all around the globe,” Trump said at an Energy Department speech last month.

Discussions over a bottle of red wine during the Hamburg meeting helped produce consensus language in the summit’s final communique, after France raised objections, the White House official said. French officials wanted to remove the entire fossil fuel sentence. The U.S. in turn argued it couldn’t weaken that sentence unless another was strengthened.

Trump discussed the accord with French President Emmanuel Macron during a visit to the country. “Something could happen with respect to the Paris accord,” Trump said at a joint news conference with Macron on Thursday. “We’ll see what happens.”