President Trump said he’ll “absolutely” review a new dire report on climate change from the United Nations, though he expressed some skepticism about its authors.
“It was given to me and I want to look at who drew it, which group drew it,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday just before leaving for an Iowa campaign rally.
“Because I can give you reports that are fabulous and I can give you reports that aren’t so good,” he said. “But I’ll be looking at it, absolutely.”
{mosads}The remarks were the president’s first comments on the report since it was released by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) late Sunday.
Among its warnings were that the world ought to dramatically cut emissions in an unprecedented way by 2030 or face grave consequences such as coral reef die-offs and lower crop yields. Scientists predicted some of those impacts even with just 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) of global warming.
The report was commissioned in 2015 as part of the Paris agreement. Its authors came from dozens of countries and major institutions like the University of Oxford, Duke University and Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies.
Trump has been dismissive of climate change science in the past, calling it a hoax previously, though he and his administration have acknowledged that pollution from human activity plays some role in global warming. The scientific consensus is that human activity, via greenhouse gas emissions, is far and away the main cause of the changing climate.
Until Trump’s statement, the White House’s official word on the report was to highlight how much the United States has led the world in carbon dioxide emissions reductions.
“From 2005 to 2017, U.S. CO2-related emissions declined by 14 percent while global energy-related CO2 emissions rose by 21 percent during the same time,” White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walter said. “This has been possible through the development and large-scale deployment of new, affordable, and cleaner technologies to capitalize on our energy abundance.”
Trump has taken numerous steps to undo or weaken climate change regulations on the books, like repealing the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan, rolling back greenhouse gas rules for cars and easing methane pollution standards for oil and natural gas drillers.
He has also pledged to pull the United States out of the Paris agreement.