A White House working group aimed at opposing the scientific consensus on global warming is the latest step in Trump’s long history of climate denial.
By Juliet Eilperin and Juliet Eilperin Reporter covering national affairs Email Bio Follow Toluse Olorunnipa Toluse Olorunnipa White House reporter Email Bio Follow February 28 at 3:35 PM From the earliest days of his administration, President Trump has been at war with his own government over climate change.
Meade Krosby, senior scientist at the University of Washington’s Climate Impacts Group, said the initiative showed a disconnect with reality. The world has already warmed more than 1 degree Celsius since preindustrial levels, and a recent U.N. scientific report concluded the world will have to cut its carbon output 45 percent by 2030 to avert some of the most catastrophic consequences of climate change.
The White House’s push against climate science has exposed a modest rift within the Republican Party, as some are edging toward a more centrist position. And it has provided a potential political opportunity for Democrats, who have been grappling with their own intraparty fight over how ambitious to be when it comes to cutting carbon.
Trump sees the climate debate as a political messaging war, according to several current and former administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk frankly. Convinced that the scientific literature on climate change is funded and directed by liberals, he has said on repeated occasions that he expects the climate to change back to colder average temperatures. It amounts to an endorsement of the “global cooling” forecast some researchers made in the 1970s.
Deputies who have sought to make the case for climate action to Trump have not fared well. During a meeting just weeks before the president announced the U.S. would exit the Paris agreement, then-National Economic Council director Gary Cohn noted that several major chief executives had just published a joint letter urging him to stay within the deal.
Trump’s rejection of climate science stretches back to at least 2010. Shortly after signing a letter calling for U.S. action to combat climate change, Trump changed course and began calling the whole concept “a con,” voicing many of the same arguments he uses today. The anti-science views espoused by Trump allow the him to cast aside inconvenient facts and shape an argument that aligns with his political goals and his other long-held views, said Tim O’Brien, author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.”
“Certainly, the climate is changing, it has been changing. It’s a combination of natural variability and human influence,” Kelvin Droegemeier, the head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in an interview last week. “Over the past 70 years or so, human influence has played a significant role.”
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