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Steven Munching, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, told CNBC that our environmental policies are misunderstood while addressing a comment on the intensifying climate crisis.
When asked to share his views on Greta Thunberg (a Swedish climate activist) Thursday on “Squawk Box,” Mnuchin said to the co-host Joe Kernen, “Let me just mention because obviously, the climate issue is something that is being discussed about this week.”
“And I think, quite frankly, our environmental policies are misunderstood. The president fully believes in clean air and fresh water. He likes to support a clean environment,” Mnuchin told Kernen.
President Trump has repeatedly conveyed scepticism about the scale of the climate crisis. On Tuesday, he criticized participants at the World Economic Forum for ignoring the “perennial prophets of doom.”
The U.S. president didn’t call anyone directly in his speech, but he did encourage listeners to reject climate “alarmists” and their respective “predictions of the apocalypse.”
Since coming to power in 2016, Trump’s administration has worked to pull the U.S. – one of the world’s chief carbon emitters – out of the Paris Agreement and wished to roll back over 80 environmental regulations.
“If you look at some real environmental issues right now, they’re in China, they’re in India. Suppose you look at what the U.S. has been doing independently, without government intervention. In that case, the industry has become much more efficient regarding carbon emissions,” U.S. Secretary of Treasury Steven Mnuchin said.