Does Donald Trump still think climate change is a hoax? No one can say

As a businessman, President Trump was a frequent and scornful critic of the concept of climate change. In the years before running for president, he called it “nonexistent,” “mythical” and a “a total con job.” Whenever snow fell in New York, it seemed, he would mock the idea of global warming.

“Global warming has been proven to be a canard repeatedly over and over again,” he wrote on Twitter in 2012. In another post later that year, he said, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.” A year later, he wrote that “global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!”

But on Friday, a day after Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris climate change accord, the White House refused to say whether the president still considers climate change a hoax. As other leaders around the world vowed to confront climate change without the United States, Trump’s advisers fanned out to defend his decision and, when pressed, said they did not know his view of the science underlying the debate. “I have not had an opportunity to have that discussion,” said Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary.

“I do not speak for the president,” said Ryan Zinke, the interior secretary.

“You should ask him that,” said Kellyanne Conway, the White House counsellor.

Trump offered no opportunity for anyone to ask him that on Friday. But his current views, whatever they may be, presumably shaped his thinking as he evaluated whether to remain in the Paris accord. Given that he promised on Thursday to seek to re-enter the pact on better terms or negotiate an entirely new deal that he said would be fairer to the United States, his acceptance or denial of climate science seems likely to determine his approach.

In his speech announcing his decision, he did not address the science of climate change or repeat any of the scepticism he has expressed for years. Instead, he cast it largely in economic terms, arguing that President Barack Obama agreed to a bad deal for Americans that would handcuff the economy and put the United States at a disadvantage against its international competitors. He did not say the goal itself was pointless, only that it would be too much of a burden.

©2017 The New York Times News Service