Al Gore rips Trump as the face of ‘climate denial’

Former Vice President Al Gore said late Wednesday that President Trump is the face of “climate denial.”

“It’s really significant … that Donald J. Trump is now the face of climate denial,” Gore said to host Trevor Noah on “The Daily Show.”

{mosads}“And there are those who are still giving him their loyalty and trust. And I get that, believe me. But the vast majority of Americans, not to mention all around the world, are really kind of … they’ve had it with the constant craziness, if you want to call it that way.”

Gore went on to say that he thinks Trump’s rhetoric and actions on climate change have sparked opposition to him and his administration. He cited the most recent midterm elections and the gains Democrats made in the House as an example. 

His comments come just days after the government released a report that warned that changing climate could have profound consequences on the U.S. economy if not acted on. 

Gore said that “we are treating the atmosphere as an open sewer” before stating that society is “dumping 110 million tons of man-made, heat-trapping global warming pollution into it every day.”

Trump has continued to dispute the consensus scientists have reached around climate change. He said in an interview with The Washington Post earlier this week that he doesn’t see that climate change is man-made. 

“One of the problems that a lot of people like myself, we have very high levels of intelligence but we’re not necessarily such believers,” Trump said. “You look at our air and our water and it’s right now at a record clean.”

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Tuesday that the recently released climate report wasn’t “based on facts.”

“The president’s certainly leading on what matters most in this process, and that’s on having clean air, clean water,” Sanders told reporters at a press briefing. “In fact, the United States continues to be a leader on that front.”

Trump, who campaigned on an “America First” agenda, withdrew from the Paris climate agreement in 2017.

He said at the time that the deal, negotiated under the Obama administration, had put the interests of other countries ahead of America’s — particularly the interests of the Rust Belt states that determined the 2016 presidential election.