"An extraordinary abdication of American leadership" -- John Kerry

Former Secretary of State, John Kerry, responded to President Trump's announcement that he is pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accord.

Sec. Kerry:  "My immediate reaction is that it is an extraordinary abdication of American leadership.  It is a shameful moment for the United States to have unilaterally walked away from an agreement which did not have one other country requiring us to do something.  It was a voluntary program.  We designed the program.

"The president (Trump) was not truthful with the American people today, and the president, who talked about putting America First, has now put America last -- together with Syria, which is in the middle of a civil war and Nicaragua which thought the agreement didn't go far enough.

"This is an extraordinary moment of fake news, because the economy he described is not the economy of America.   America has been gaining jobs in solar;   solar has been gaining at the rate of 17 times the rate of our economy.

"There are 2.6 million jobs in our country in clean energy, half of them are in states that Donald Trump won.   So he is not helping the forgotten American;  he is hurting them, their kids will have worse asthma in the summer;  they will have a harder time having economic growth.  He's made us an environmental pariah in the world, and I think it is one of the most self-destructive moves I've ever seen by any president in my lifetime."

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Those are the words of former Secretary of State John Kerry, under whose tenure this Paris Accord was planned and carried out.   As he said, "We (meaning Americans) designed the program."   Yet Trump is speaking as though America is the aggrieved party.   That's a narrative that Trump himself sought to capitalize on during the campaign, and he's putting his campaign promise to those voters ahead of what he must know is good for our country.

This man has no honor or integrity.   What he says is entirely transactional, and it's motivated only by what will further his interest -- at the moment.    And it may be different another day.   Yes, this was a campaign promise, but why today?    With the investigations getting closer and closer to him and his family, he needed to throw out a distraction.   Never mind the future of the world.