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Vice President Joe Biden addresses Notre Dame students after receiving the Laetare Medal at the 2016 Commencement Ceremony.

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WILMINGTON, Delaware, November 7, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — Three years after President Donald Trump announced that the United States would leave the so-called Paris Agreement on climate change, the U.S. officially left Wednesday. Joe Biden promptly tweeted that he would reverse that decision:

“Today, the Trump Administration officially left the Paris Climate Agreement,” Biden tweeted on November 4. “And in exactly 77 days, a Biden Administration will rejoin it.”

The Agreement was signed by nearly 200 countries and “aims to prevent the earth’s temperatures from rising 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial revolution temperatures, the value that scientists have determined will have disastrous consequences if exceeded,” according to ABC News.

Supporters of the agreement have speculated that without immediate action on lowering carbon emissions, more violent weather conditions would occur, sea levels would rise, and there would be an increase in droughts and wildfires. Such extreme conditions “could lead to mass migration and shortages in food production.”

Trump took a different view of the agreement that was originally negotiated by President Barack Obama. He said U.S. businesses would be at a “permanent disadvantage” compared to those in other countries, and that the U.S. would be punished with “onerous energy restrictions” and “an unfair financial burden.”

The U.S., Trump said, “has already reduced its carbon-dioxide emissions by 12 percent since 2006 and is already a Clean Energy leader.”

For pro-life and pro-family groups, the key reason to support Trump’s decision to leave the Paris Agreement on climate change was language “designed to promote abortion and contraception,” as Voice of the Family put it.

The agreement states, “Parties should, when taking action to address climate change, respect, promote and consider their respective obligations on human rights, the right to health, the rights of indigenous peoples, local communities, migrants, children, persons with disabilities and people in vulnerable situations and the right to development, as well as gender equality, empowerment of women and intergenerational equity.”

As Voice of the Family pointed out, terms like “gender equality” and “empowerment of women” may initially seem innocuous to many readers but experience has shown that these terms are often used to advance a dangerous ideology,” like abortion and contraception.

The Vatican, in spite of the pro-abortion and pro-contraception language in the agreement, was also critical of Trump’s decision.

Pope Francis himself said in September, “We need to do everything in our capacity to limit global average temperature rise under the threshold of 1.5°C enshrined in the Paris Climate Agreement, for going beyond that will prove catastrophic, especially for poor communities around the world.”

Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, said that Trump’s decision was “a huge slap in the face for us” and “a disaster for everyone.”

Michael Hichborn, president of the Lepanto Institute, commented, “Not only is so-called man-made global climate change not settled science, but let’s not forget that it was Bishop Sorondo who betrayed the Church and the entire pro-life movement by hosting a cadre of population-control enthusiasts in a Vatican-sponsored meeting.”

“It was Bishop Sorondo who invited pro-abortion socialist Bernie Sanders to attend a Vatican meeting during the U. S. presidential campaign,” he added.