Obama takes swipe at Trump on Paris climate accord

Bloomberg

Former US President Barack Obama pointed to the importance of the Paris climate accord while criticizing Donald Trump for pulling the world’s biggest economy out of the pact.
Trump said last month he would withdraw from the pact and seek to negotiate a better deal, in a move that attracted widespread criticism from counterparts in Europe and elsewhere. The decision by Trump to walk away from the 2015 agreement was also criticized by business leaders, with some describing it as a setback for the environment.
“In Paris, we came together around the most ambitious agreement in history to fight climate change,” Obama said on Saturday in a speech at the opening of the Fourth Congress of the Indonesian Diaspora in Jakarta. He said it was ‘an agreement that even with the temporary absence of American leadership will still give our children a fighting chance.’
“The challenges of our times, whether it’s economic inequality, changing climate, terrorism, mass migration; these are really challenges and we’re going to have to confront them together,” he said.
Obama, who has been holidaying in Indonesia met
President Joko Widodo, also warned in remarks against
rising sectarian politics around the world, as well as growing discrimination based on race and ethnicity.
“There are going to be some big decisions to make about Indonesia and about the United States and about the world in the years to come,” he said. “It’s been clear for a while that the world is at a crossroads, at an inflection point.”
He said in Jakarta there had been “enormous progress” which had occurred “in part because of the stability that the United States helped support here in the Asia Pacific.”
But the former president said there are also challenges, and that globalization and technology had created problems and “shifts in the foundations of societies” and in politics both in developing and developed countries.