U.S. President Donald Trump has criticized all international efforts to lower the consequences of climate change and dismissed the scientific consensus that global warming is dangerous and driven by human consumption of fossil fuels.
However, there has been a difference between what Trump had said in his speeches and what the U.S. government has been doing overseas. Although all the attention is focused on Trump’s rhetoric, State Department envoys, federal agencies, and government scientists keep an active role in the international efforts to both research and fighting climate change, according to the U.S. and foreign representatives involved in those efforts.
“We really don’t detect any change with the Americans,” said one of the officials, Aleksi Härkönen of Finland, who chairs the eight-nation Arctic Council’s key group of senior officials, charged with protecting a region warming faster than any other on Earth.
The United States under the Obama аdministration had one of the main roles in drafting the rulebook for implementing the Paris climate accord, signing international memoranda calling for global action to fight climate change, boosting funding for overseas clean energy projects, as well as contributing to global research on the dangers and causes of the Earth’s warming.
Reuters reported that while the United States’ participation in international forums, including the Paris accord and the Arctic Council, has been reported, its continued, broad and constructive support for climate change efforts in these gatherings has not.
Meanwhile, the business-as-usual approach has confused some of America’s foreign partners, along with some of Trump’s allies, who were expecting that the new administration is going to match its rhetoric with an obstructionist approach to combating climate change, Reuters wrote.
“I am concerned that much of our climate policy remains on autopilot,” complained Trump’s former energy adviser Myron Ebell.
But the U.S. efforts to combat global warming oversees have been countered by President Trump’s policy to increase the U.S. production of fossil fuels which scientists are blaming for the climate change. Trump has also rollbacked a number of climate regulations implemented by Former President Barack Obama and the appointment of the self-described climate skeptic, Scott Pruitt, as the nation’s chief environmental regulator.
Additionally, the new Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, has been known to go against the scientific community and dismiss all the facts that global warming is starting to affect our planet.
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