WASHINGTON – U.S. Senators Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and Cindy Hyde-Smith, R-Miss., today highlighted their support of legislation to prohibit the use of U.S. taxpayer dollars to implement an international climate change pact that would drive up the cost of food, energy, and services for American families.

Wicker and Hyde-Smith are original cosponsors of the No Taxpayer Funding for Paris Climate Agreement Act (S.364), which was introduced in response to President Biden’s inauguration day decision to rejoin the Paris Agreement. President Trump judged the agreement as patently unfair to the United States and abandoned the plan. 

“Rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement is disastrous for our economy and does little to improve our environment,” Wicker said. “Americans will bear the cost by paying higher prices for food and other goods and services. This legislation would ensure Americans do not also pay for this job-killing agreement with their own tax dollars.”

“Rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement is a mistake. This poorly negotiated accord is a challenge to American sovereignty and our economic growth, while giving worse polluters like China a pass,” Hyde-Smith said. “There are better ways to confront climate change without putting Mississippi families and businesses on the line for higher energy bills and restrictions on their futures.”

S.364 would prohibit the use of U.S. taxpayer dollars to rejoin the Paris Agreement, which was reached in December 2015 by the 21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Heritage Foundation analysts found if the United States stayed in the Paris Agreement, there would be an overall loss of nearly 400,000 jobs, half of which would be in manufacturing. This analysis also determined the Paris Agreement would result in an average total income loss of more than $20,000 for a family of four; and an aggregate GDP loss of over $2.5 trillion.

From the beginning, critics panned the Paris Agreement for being unfair to United States and lenient with major polluting nations like China, India, Pakistan, and Russia. MarketWatch reported in December 2020 that China, a Paris accord member and the world’s largest polluter, “released the equivalent of 10 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in 2018, according to the Global Carbon Project that tracks emissions worldwide. That was almost twice as much as the U.S. and three times as much as the European Union.”

Introduced by Senator Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., the legislation has been referred to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.