President Trump said Thursday that “nothing’s a hoax” about climate change, the same day that he announced a rollback to a major environmental law.
“Nothing’s a hoax about that. It’s a very serious subject. I want clean air; I want clean water. I want the cleanest air with the cleanest water. The environment’s very important to me,” Trump told reporters.
“I also want jobs. I don’t want to close up our industry because somebody said you have to go with wind or you have to go with something else that’s not going to be able to have the capacity to do what we have to do,” he added.
Trump’s remarks came as part of a White House event tied to changes the president announced Thursday to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The changes would relieve agencies from considering climate change as they weigh environmental impacts of major infrastructure projects.
Interior Secretary David Bernhardt told reporters on a call that NEPA has “paralyzed commonsense decisionmaking for a generation.”
Environmental groups criticized the changes, saying they would allow the government to turn a blind eye to projects that emit significant amounts of greenhouse gases.
The changes will be posted to the Federal Register on Friday.
Trump has similarly said he was “into climate” last year, despite bashing environmentalists as “loco,” the Spanish word for crazy.
“I’m very much into climate,” he said at the time. “I consider myself in many ways to be an environmentalist.”
At other points, Trump has expressed skepticism about climate change, including a 2012 tweet suggesting it was created by China to hurt U.S. manufacturing.
“The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive,” he wrote at the time.
Updated at 1:59 p.m.