Providing a disturbing look at how the Trump administration will insert its anti-climate agenda on global treaties and policy, the U.S. State Department last week aggressively lobbied the multinational Arctic Council to scrub language about global warming and renewable energy from its biennial declaration, InsideClimate News reported on Friday.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning news organization was leaked a confidential draft version of the agreement that included “track-change suggestions by the State Department’s acting assistant secretary, Judith Garber.”

According to the leaked draft, the U.S. State Department sought to eliminate or weaken language regarding the Paris Climate Agreement, the implementation of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, improving Arctic communities’ access to renewable energy, and the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

In one example, the U.S. successfully lobbied for the removal of the word “strongly” from the following statement: “Note with concern that the pace and scale of continuing Arctic warming will strongly depend on future emissions of greenhouse gases and short-lived climate pollutants.”

President Donald Trump’s Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had traveled to Fairbanks, Alaska last week to hand off the United States’ two-year chairmanship of the council to Finland. At each biennial meeting, top officials from each of the eight Arctic Council nations sign a declaration establishing “the scientific and diplomatic work that was accomplished and to state the council’s goals going forward,” as InsideClimate News explains.

The Fairbanks Declaration was the result of three negotiations largely overseen by the Obama administration. By the third and final negotiation, “the general consensus was that the document was largely finalized.” However, on May 9, Trump’s State Department threw a wrench in the works.

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