Trump doesn’t believe climate change is caused by humans, and it might be a « hoax » made up by the Chinese.
The move was consistent with Trump’s recent statements on climate change — though at one point, it appears he was concerned about the issue.
Trump’s history of commenting on climate change mostly begins in 2009, when he signed a full page ad in the New York Times directed at President Obama, urging him to take action on climate change.
Unless someone else signed his name for him, or he signed without reading the letter, it is safe to assume at that time Donald Trump believed in manmade climate change and its dangers.
According to Grist, which broke the news, « None of the signers that Grist interviewed this week could recall who had organized the letter or knew who had asked Trump to sign. » It’s unclear how big of a role President Trump had in the letter.
But things soon changed. A ‘hoax’
In November 2011, Trump insisted on Twitter that global warming wasn’t real because it was snowing in New York City in October, a theme that has come up in his Twitter history many times over the years.
His first couple of tweets on climate change in 2012 criticized President Obama for spending billions of dollars on the issue, and the World Bank for » tying poverty to ‘climate change’ . »
In 2013 President Trump moved on to comment on the popularity of referring to the issue as « climate change » instead of « global warming. »
Then he came out with this statement in November 2012:
In fact, Trump has connected China and climate change quite a few times in his Twitter history. In April of 2013 he said: « The Chinese talk of climate change and carbon footprint but don’t clean up their factories-but they sell us the equipment to clean up ours! »
In December of the same year, he tweeted « We should be focusing on beautiful, clean air & not on wasteful & very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullsh-t! China & others are hurting our air. »
Twice on December 6th, 2013, Trump declared global warming an » expensive hoax . » This stance stands up pretty well to Trump’s declaration on Thursday that the Paris Agreement « is less about climate, and more about the rest of the world gaining economic advantage over the United States. »
Trump sarcastically tweeted about record setting low-temperatures across the US in December of 2013, saying it « must be global warming, I mean climate change! » He may not have realized the record-setting cold temperatures directly supports the climate change theory (climate change can lead to temperature swings in both directions) .
