It's not exactly news that North Korea is upset with the United States. However, the subject matter of the most recent dustup between the nuclear-armed dictatorship and the "America First" Trump administration is an unusual one.
On Tuesday, North Korea's foreign ministry blasted Trump for his decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, removing the world's second-largest emitter of global warming pollutants from the treaty.
SEE ALSO: Trump who? Tech giants join massive effort to uphold Paris AgreementIn announcing the withdrawal on June 1 from the nearly universally supported agreement, Trump earned the scorn of the European Union, China, India, Brazil, and many other nations that have been taking ambitious actions to reduce their emissions of global warming gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane.
Trump said the move was aimed at preserving and creating more American jobs, even though the studies he cited during his speech omitted the steep costs from climate change itself, such as sea level rise inundating valuable real estate in coastal cities.
2016 was the warmest calendar year on record worldwide. Credit: bob al-greene/mashable/nasa data A spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of North Korea said that Trump's move and his overall "America First" foreign policy "is the height of egoism and moral vacuum seeking only their own well-being even at the cost of the entire planet..."
The spokesman went on to call Trump's Paris Agreement decision "short-sighted and silly," and "ignorant of the fact that the protection of the global environment is in their own interests."
"The selfish act of the U.S. does not only have grave consequences for the international efforts to protect the environment, but poses great danger to other areas as well," the spokesman said.
North Korea has vowed to combat deforestation but is viewed as increasingly vulnerable to climate change, given the country’s frequent food shortages. One of its only economic lifelines is the export of carbon-intensive coal to China, which is the world’s number one emitter of greenhouse gases.
Interestingly, Trump's decision is not popular at home either, with two recent polls showing the majority of the American people support staying in the agreement.
The U.S. is now one of just three countries worldwide to be either outside the agreement or on their way out, with Syria and Nicaragua as the other two nations. Nicaragua, though, never joined because it didn't think the agreement goes far enough toward preventing dangerous amounts of global warming.
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