Updated: October 23, 2020 11:36:39 am
President Donald Trump speaks during the second and final presidential debate on Thursday, Oct. 22, 2020, at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, with former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential candidate. (AP)
During his second and final presidential debate with his Democratic rival Joe Biden, President Donald Trump compared the United States to India, China and Russia on climate change and said that these countries are dirty and don’t care much about their air, but the United States yes.
Look at China. How disgusting it is. Look at Russia. Look at India, it’s dirty. The air is dirty, ”Trump said, adding that the United States has the best carbon emissions in 35 years. “We have the cleanest air, the cleanest water and the best carbon emissions.”
The president of the United States also reiterated that he “took us out” of the Paris Agreement because it was “very unfair.” “I got out of the Paris Agreement because we had to extract billions of dollars and they treated us very unfairly. I will not sacrifice millions of jobs … thousands of companies for the Paris Agreement. It’s very unfair, ”Trump said.
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In November 2019, the US formally notified the UN of its withdrawal from the 2015 Paris climate accord, a landmark global agreement that brought together 188 nations, including India, to combat global warming. The Paris Agreement, in which Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama and Prime Minister Narendra Modi played a pivotal role, was adopted at the UN climate conference “COP 21” held in the French capital in 2015 with the aim of reducing dangerous greenhouse gas emissions.
Although Trump announced his decision to withdraw from the historic agreement on June 1, 2017, the process began after almost two and a half years in 2019 with the formal notification and the US will exit the agreement on November 4, 2020.
On Friday, in addition to climate change, Trump and Biden discussed a number of topics including Covid-19 and the pandemic economy, racism and police brutality, foreign policy and healthcare. The debate, unlike the previous one, was more disciplined and substantive.
On the vaccine front, Trump said a COVID-19 vaccine is “ready” and will be announced “within weeks” to combat the deadly disease that has killed more than 223,000 Americans.
Before the debate, organizers had said that both Trump and Biden would have two uninterrupted minutes to respond to each segment. While this brought more structure to the debate, there were times when the conversation veered off, only to be picked up by NBC News moderator Kristen Welker.
The country will vote on November 3 to choose its representative. At least 35 million people have already cast their votes, according to the Electoral Project of the University of Florida in the United States, more than a quarter of the total of 2016 votes.
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