Tony Abbott urges withdrawal from Paris agreement, despite signing Australia up as PM

Tony Abbott, the prime minister who signed Australia up to the Paris agreement before losing the Liberal party leadership in 2015, now says Australia needs to pull out of the treaty to end “the emissions obsession that’s at the heart of our power crisis”.

Tony Abbott before his speech at the Australian
 Environment Foundation event in Melbourne urging Australia to abandon the Paris climate agreement.

In a significant escalation of his campaign against the national energy guarantee, and in an overt political attack on Malcolm Turnbull, Abbott used a speech to a group of climate sceptics on Tuesday night to claim he would not have signed up to the Paris treaty had he known the US would withdraw from it.

Despite saying in 2015 that Australia was making a “definite commitment” to a 26% reduction in emissions and “with the circumstances that we think will apply ... we can go up to 28%” – Abbott says now he didn’t anticipate, as prime minister, “how the aspirational targets we agreed to at Paris would, in different hands, become binding commitments”.

Read the story from The Guardian by Katharine Murphy - “Tony Abbott urges withdrawal from Paris agreement, despite signing Australia up as PM.”