DOWN TO EARTH
Top aide: Trump is pro-planet
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross insisted Friday that President Trump was “very pro-environment” — while the White House stubbornly refused to say whether the commander in chief still believed climate change was a “hoax.”
“He is an environmentalist. I’ve known him for a very long time. He’s very pro-environment,” Ross said Friday on NBC’s “Today” show. Pressed by host Matt Lauer how he could say that a day after the president pulled the United States out of the Paris Climate Accord, Ross said Trump was merely reversing a bad deal brokered by Barack Obama.
“You’re taking as the given that the Obama administration was right and any other action was wrong,” Ross said.
He added that the Paris agreement wasn’t fair because it would allow emissions to increase in China for years.
“That’s hardly climate control,” Ross said. “We were giving money upfront so they would be able to continue increasing their emissions until 2030. Is that a balanced deal? I don’t think so.”
Later Friday, both EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and administration spokesman Sean Spicer ducked repeated questions about whether Trump believed climate change was real or a myth, as he had said and tweeted for years.
“What’s interesting about all the discussions that we had through the last several weeks have been focused on one singular issue: Is Paris good or not for this country?” Pruitt said at a White House press briefing. “That’s the discussions I’ve had with the president.”
When told that he hadn’t answered the question, Pruitt replied, “I did answer the question.”
When asked specifically whether Trump believes climate change is real, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway responded: “The president believes in a clean environment, clean air, clean water.” Trump over the years posted numerous tweets mocking the global effort to fight climate shift, calling it a “con” and a hoax devised by China.
In 2012, he said global warming was “based on faulty science and manipulated data.”
And in November 2012, he joked about global warming while it was “freezing and snowing in New York” — an idea he repeated in January, March and December the following year as well as at least three times in 2014.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, meanwhile, said Friday he believed the US would keep cutting greenhouse-gas emissions despite pulling out of the pact.
Tillerson, who had urged Trump not to abandon the deal, downplayed the significance of the move, saying it was a "policy decision" and that he hoped "people can keep it in perspective."
While other world leaders have strongly condemned Trump’s decision to abandon the Paris accord, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday he won’t judge.
“Don’t worry, be happy!” Putin quipped after being asked for his reaction at an economic forum in St. Petersburg. He said the climate deal doesn’t formally go into effect until 2021, giving nations years to come up with a constructive solution to combating global warming.
He is an environmentalist. I’ve known him for a very long time. He’s very proenvironment. — Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, speaking of the president on the “Today” show Friday