Scott Pruitt: Paris Deal Was a $2.5 Trillion Reduction in Our GDP over 10 Years
STEPHANOPOULOS: As you know, you’ve received a lot of backlash from the business community. Twenty-five businesses have signed a letter to the president, saying this is not good for the economy. Here’s what they wrote.
They say, “By expanding markets for innovative, clean technologies, the agreement generates jobs and economic growth. U.S. companies are well positioned to lead in these markets. Withdrawing from the agreement will limit our access to them and could expose us to retaliatory measures.”
They believe it’s going to be bad for the economy to pull out.
PRUITT: Well, when you look at — even “The New York Times” had an article I think within the last couple of days that talked about small business celebrating, euphoria, with respect to the Paris — the president’s decision. I mean, it’s very speculative, in my estimation, George, for those multinational companies to say this is going to somehow impact the exporting of green technology across the globe.
What we do know — what we do know, objectively, is that the Paris agreement represented a $2.5 trillion reduction in our gross domestic product over two years — ten years. What we do know is that it impacted up to 400,000 jobs as well. And so this was something that was bad for our country. This makes common sense, that when you take energy sector jobs and say we’re no longer going to produce energy in those sectors, that it’s going to impact the manufacturing base and the energy jobs in this country.
We’ve had over 50,000 jobs since last quarter — coal jobs, mining jobs — created in this country. We had almost 7,000 mining and coal jobs created in the month of May alone. The unemployment rate is 4.3 percent, as you know, George. This president’s deregulation agenda, particularly in the energy space, is making a substantial impact on the jobs across this country and giving people hope.
And I will say this. It’s also rejecting the previous administration’s view that you can’t grow jobs and protect the environment. Because, as I indicated earlier, we’ve reduced our CO2 footprint with action from 2000 to 2014 by over 18 percent, through innovation and technology.
