France strikes back at White House climate video

  • 05/06/2017

Tensions are running high after US President Donald Trump announced the US was to pull out of the UN's Paris climate agreement.

The French foreign ministry has jumped into the debate with a heated rebuttal of a video posted by the White House criticising the deal.

On Thursday, the White House tweeted a video saying the "Paris Accord is a bad deal for Americans" which "accomplishes little" and was "badly negotiated" by former US president Barack Obama.

But France isn't taking it lying down, publicly sharing its own video.

It's almost identical to the US video, with one key difference: it's interrupted with a handwritten font fact-checking the White House.

It swaps out the US's claim Mr Obama poured money into a UN "slush fund", changing it to say it was a "green climate fund to invest in low-emission and climate-resilient development".

It also changes the US's critique the deal was "badly negotiated", to say it was "comprehensively negotiated".  

"#MakeThePlanetGreatAgain," the French agency tweeted.

The UN-brokered Paris agreement commits to keep rising global temperatures to "well below" 2degC by 2100.

The US was originally a major player in the negotiations.

Newshub.