Secretary of State John Kerry tore into Donald Trump’s promise to pull out of the Paris climate agreement.
{mosads}“Ripping up the climate agreement that was reached in Paris would be reckless, counterproductive, self-destructive,” Kerry told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes during a Wednesday night interview.
“It would, in the end, be an act of ignorance — of utter, unbelievable, contemptuous ignorance,” he said.
Kerry went on to call the idea “one of the most reckless, irresponsible, historically wrong acts I could think of.”
He cited recent temperature records to boost his case, arguing that the Paris agreement is necessary if the world has any hope of mitigating climate change.
“Somewhere people ought to be catching on to what is happening,” Kerry said.
The secretary of State played a key role in crafting the nonbinding Paris agreement, in which 195 countries agreed for the first time to limit greenhouse gas emissions. The pact was years in the making, after the Kyoto protocol failed to achieve its goals.
In slamming Trump’s promise to pull out of the deal, Kerry joins Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton, former climate envoy Todd Stern, Stern’s successor Jonathan Pershing, the outgoing and incoming United Nations officials in charge of the climate pact’s enforcement and numerous environmental groups in the criticism.