President Trump announced his plans to pull out of the Paris climate agreement today in a jazz-accompanied spectacle at the Rose Garden. He justified the decision by arguing that the terms of the accord “could cost Americans as much as 2.7 million lost jobs by 2025.” Of those, he claimed 440,000 would be manufacturing jobs. “Believe me,” the President said. “This is not what we need.”
But experts say that there are some problems with the way Trump presented those numbers. “It’s not something you can cite in a presidential speech with a straight face,” says Yale economist Kenneth Gillingham. “It’s being used as a talking point taken out of context.”
2.7 million lost jobs are probably an extreme, and unlikely, worst case scenario
The source for President Trump’s numbers is a report by the consulting firm National Economics Research Associates (NERA). The report was commissioned by the American Council for Capital Formation and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, two organizations that the Natural Resources Defense Council has described as “unabashed apologists for America’s biggest climate polluters.”
NERA modeled what might happen to the economy if the US were to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as promised in the Paris climate agreements. It reported that total “economy-wide employment losses amount to about 2.7 million in 2025” and that “the manufacturing sector alone could potentially lose 440,000 job-equivalents.” (NERA did not respond immediately to an emailed request for comment.)