House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) declared Monday that the United States will join other nations in their fight against climate change at a United Nations-led press conference in Madrid, Spain.
“By coming here we want to say to everyone, we’re still in,” Pelosi said of the U.S.’s commitment to tackling global warming. “The United States is still in.”
The House Speaker is leading a delegation of 14 other House and Senate Democrats to this year’s U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP25) in an effort to assuage concerns of the U.S.’s scheduled withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement. Pelosi is representing only herself and congressional Democrats on the trip. Accompanying the California Democrat on the tax-payer funded trip are: Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ), Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ), Rep. Kathy Castor (D-FL), Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN), Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR), Rep. Julia Brownley (D-CA), Rep. Jared Huffman (D-CA), Rep. Scott Peters (D-CA), Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-MI), Rep. Mike Levin (D-CA), Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL), and Rep. Joe Neguse (D-CO).
In a statement, the COP25 said its chief aim of the convention is to “raise overall ambition also by completing several key aspects with respect to the full operationalization of the Paris Climate Change Agreement.”
“Other focus areas at COP25 will include adaptation, loss and damage, transparency, finance, capacity-building, Indigenous issues, oceans, forestry, gender and more,” it added.
President Donald Trump formally withdrew the U.S. from the Obama-era agreement in October, fulling a key campaign promise as part of his “America First” agenda, in which he pledged to “represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.”
At the time, the president noted that complying with the pact would impact “as much as 2.7 million lost jobs by 2025” and lead to 440,000 fewer manufacturing jobs.
The U.S. will officially exit the agreement on November 4, 2020.
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