Trump says U.S. is cleanest nation; facts say not even close

WASHINGTON— U.S. President Donald Trump said the United States “will continue to be the cleanest and most environmentally friendly country on Earth” as he announced a U.S. pullout from an international accord designed to curb climate change. But facts muddy that claim. Data show that the U.S. is among the dirtiest countries when it comes to heat-trapping carbon pollution. One nation that has cleaner air in nearly every way is Sweden.

“The U.S. is well behind other countries in having the cleanest and most sustainable environment,” University of Michigan environmental scientist Rosina Bierbaum said.

The U.S. emits more carbon dioxide than any other nation except China. In 2014, the U.S. spewed 237 times more carbon dioxide into the air than Sweden, according to figures by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

“On pretty much any climate-related indicator, the U.S. will not look good,” said Glen Peters, a Norwegian climate scientist who is part of the Global Carbon Project that ranks worldwide emissions.

The U.S. is No. 2 in per person carbon dioxide pollution, behind Luxembourg, among 35 developed nations plus China, India and Brazil, Energy Department data show. That’s 17.3 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year for the average American, compared with 4.5 tonnes for the average Swede.

“In the fight for our planet, we plan to work side by side,” French President Emmanuel Macron said on Saturday after a meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with whom Macron pledged to work together to cut carbon emissions, reaffirming their commitments to the Paris accord.

While neither leader mentioned Trump by name, both stressed their commitment to the Paris accord, which the U.S. president vilified Thursday as being harmful to the American economy. “We have a common responsibility to protect our mother planet,” Modi said.

“We are fully engaged on the politi- cal, economic and environmental front,” Modi said.

“We are committed to the Paris accord and will continue with the Paris accord, and we will go beyond the Paris accord.”

Taking into account economics, the U.S. ranks 10th highest in carbon pollution per gross domestic product behind China, India, Russia, Estonia, Poland, South Korea, the Czech Republic, Mexico and Turkey, according to the International Energy Agency.

The U.S. spews almost five times more carbon dioxide per dollar in the economy than Sweden.

Because carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for more than a century, scientists and regulators say it’s more important to look at historical emissions. Since 1870, the U.S. has produced about one-quarter of the world’s carbon dioxide — twice as much as China — and that makes it the biggest polluter in the world by far, Peters said.

In some traditional air pollution measurements, the United States is cleaner than most nations, said William Reilly, who headed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under Republican president George H.W. Bush.

But “when the problem he is dealing with is carbon dioxide, we are notably not better than the rest of the world,” Reilly said, adding that Trump is “just wrong.” With files from Bloomberg