President Donald Trump has accused India and China of not doing enough on climate change and said they “do have not very good air, not very good water, and the sense of pollution and cleanliness”.
In one of his final interviews before leaving for Ireland at the end of his UK state visit on Wednesday, Trump, who has blamed India and other countries for justifying America’s withdrawal from the Paris climate change deal in 2017, said he believes that “there is a change in weather, and I think it changes both ways”.
Trump claimed that while the US had “some of the cleanest air”, it was other countries that were not doing enough to tackle pollution.
“China, India, Russia, and many other nations, do have not very good air, not very good water, and the sense of pollution and cleanliness. If you go to certain cities — I’m not going to name the cities although I can — you can’t even breathe, and now that air is going up,” he told Britain’s ITV channel. He was replaying his conversation with Prince Charles, an ardent campaigner on climate change issues, and admitted that the royal did most of the talking during their 90-minute discussion.
Asked if he himself believed in climate change, the US President said he believes it goes “both ways”.
“He [Charles] did most of the talking, and he was really into climate change and I think that’s great. I believe that there’s a change in weather and I think it changes both ways,” he said.
In New Delhi on Thursday, Indian environment minister Prakash Javedakar said that air quality in Delhi-NCR had improved with the number of “poor” air quality days coming down from 300 in 2014 to 206 in 2018.
The situation “is not as bad” as being portrayed in the media, he added. “Media reports are always creating a picture that lakhs of people are dying of air pollution but it is not as bad. Yes pollution is there but efforts are on,” PTI quoted Javadekar as saying.
“Number of poor air quality days in Delhi in 2016 used to be 246, and in 2014 they used to be around 300, in 2017 it came down to 213 and now it has come down to 206 (in 2018). I am confident that when 2019 figures will come, the number of poor air quality days will further come down. This is a tremendous success. The days of poor quality air have reduced. It is a significant improvement,” Javadekar said.
Trump said he was moved by Charles’s “passion for future generations” but stopped short of changing any of his views on climate science.
“Don’t forget, it used to be called global warming, that wasn’t working, then it was called climate change, now it’s actually called extreme weather because with extreme weather you can’t miss,” he said.
Trump has accused climate scientists of having a “political agenda” and called climate change a “hoax”, though he later retracted that statement. In 2017, he pulled the US out of the landmark 2015 Paris climate agreement, saying the international deal to keep global temperatures rises below 2 degrees Celsius was disadvantageous to US workers.