White House mum on Trump’s climate change beliefs

WASHINGTON — The White House refused to say Friday whether President Donald Trump still believes that climate change is a hoax, as he said for years before taking office, even as aides defended his decision to withdraw the United States from an international agreement intended to curb rising temperatures.

From the White House briefing room to television studios around the capital, Trump’s team fanned out to explain his thinking in walking away from the Paris accord a day earlier. But under questioning, each of the president’s advisers said they could not answer what he actually believed about the science of the issue.

Scott Pruitt, the EPA administrator, said the question never came up during deliberations over the agreement.

“What’s interesting about all the discussions that we had through the last several weeks have been focused on one singular issue: Is Paris good or not for this country?” he told reporters at the White House. “That’s the discussions I’ve had with the president.”

Asked several more times whether the president believes that climate change is real, Pruitt said he had answered the question.

Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, who briefed reporters after Pruitt, said he did not know the president’s views. Earlier in the week, in response to the same question, he said he had not had the chance to ask Trump. On Friday, he said he still had not had the opportunity. Asked if he would ask the president in order to clarify, Spicer said, “If I can, I will.”

Other administration officials gave similar answers Thursday and Friday, including Ryan Zinke, the interior secretary; Kellyanne Conway, the White House counselor; and Gary Cohn, the president’s national economics adviser.

“The president believes in clean air, clean water, a clean environment,” Conway said on ABC News when asked if Trump believed in climate change. The third time she was asked, she said, “You should ask him that. I hope you have the chance.”

Zinke, appearing on CNN, answered only for himself.

“I certainly don’t believe it’s a hoax,” he said. Pressed on Trump’s views, he said, “I do not speak for the president.”

As a businessman and private citizen, Trump was a frequent and scornful critic of climate change science. In the years before running for president, he called it “nonexistent,” a “canard” and a “con.” He regularly mocked the idea of global warming whenever a winter dumped snow on New York and ridiculed advocates for switching their favored term to “climate change,” saying they were trying to spin a fake phenomenon that had been disproved by cold spells.

“Global warming has been proven to be a canard repeatedly over and over again,” he wrote on Twitter in 2012. “The left needs a dose of reality.” In another post later that year, he said, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” A year later, he wrote that “global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!”