Quit stressing about climate change — it’ll all be fine.
That was the message from two of U.S. President Donald Trump’s top government appointees during a trip to Brussels last week.
Trump’s Energy Secretary Chris Wright and finance cop Paul Atkins each dismissed the EU’s comparatively stringent approach to climate regulation during their visits, with the former saying the danger posed by global warming was “overhyped.”
It comes as the EU faces increasing pressure to wind back its climate ambitions to compete with countries with looser standards, such as the U.S. and China.
Atkins, whom Trump appointed to head U.S. finance watchdog the Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this year, said global warming posed no serious threat to financial stability, and insisted it was not the place of financial regulators to police the climate-related policies of businesses.
“We’re not here to be environmental police or social police or whatever. That’s not our job,” he told POLITICO. That position contradicts the European Central Bank’s stance that climate change poses real risks to the financial system.
As for whether he believes in the science of climate change, Atkins said: “It doesn’t matter what I believe.”
Since moving into the White House in January, Trump has unleashed a barrage of domestic anti-green reforms, from winding back his predecessor Joe Biden’s massive tax breaks for low-carbon technology to withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement.
Last week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced plans to stop measuring the emissions of some of the U.S.’s top polluters, including coal plants, steel mills and oil refineries. Trump has also openly waged war on wind power, a key tool in weaning the world off fossil fuel-generated electricity.
Wright, a former oil man, did not deny the existence of climate change, but said its effects had been exaggerated.
“[T]oday your chance of dying from [an] extreme weather event is the lowest we have in recorded history, and 20 percent of kids record nightmares about climate change,” Wright said at a press conference on Friday, without citing the source of these statistics.
“So we have got people very afraid of something that’s a real issue, but we overhyped it,” he said.
He urged countries to stop subsidizing renewable energy because it was having little impact on emissions, but was costly for industry.
In the U.K. earlier in the week he told the BBC artificial intelligence would help solve climate change by cracking the problem of harnessing nuclear fusion to generate electricity in a decade or so.
The EU has among the most stringent stringent climate rules in the world, but is under pressure to wind these back, both internally and from other countries like the U.S.
European industry is struggling with high energy costs and intense competition from China, and business groups and politicians from the center to the far right have argued green rules add additional costs that industry cannot afford.
EU lawmakers are currently reviewing a proposal to slash rules requiring companies to report on their impacts on the environment, and member countries are struggling to reach an agreement on the EU’s 2040 emissions target.
The post Trump lieutenants tell Europe to stop worrying about climate change appeared first on Politico.
