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Tuesday 14 August 2018 - 08:12

Trump made some dangerous changes to environmental policy: Al Gore

Story Code : 744531
Former US Vice President Al Gore speaks during an interview in Greensboro, N.C., Monday, Aug. 13, 2018. (Photo by AP)
Former US Vice President Al Gore speaks during an interview in Greensboro, N.C., Monday, Aug. 13, 2018. (Photo by AP)

Gore said in an interview with The Associated Press in Greensboro, North Carolina, on Monday that Trump's administration has, however, done "some damage" by undoing several environmental regulations, including many introduced by the Obama administration.

“He (President Trump) has had less of an impact so far than I feared that he would. Someone said last year his administration is a blend of malevolence and incompetence,” Gore said.

“I think they’ve made some mistakes in some of the moves they’ve made. The courts have blocked some of what they wanted to do as a result,” he added.

“The US system has a lot of inherent resilience,” said Gore, a Nobel Peace Prize winner for his anti-climate change efforts.
He expressed optimism that public opinion could undermine some efforts from the Trump administration to further deregulate the environment.

“It’s hard for one person, even the president, to change things very quickly if the majority of American people don’t want them changed,” he said.

Gore spoke in North Carolina on behalf of the Poor People’s Campaign, which names “ecological devastation” as one of the problems undermining poor people. Gore wrote a book on the climate, “Earth in the Balance,” and also made a documentary called “An Inconvenient Truth.” Recently he established The Climate Reality Project .

In March last year, Trump signed an executive order aimed at rolling back most of his predecessor’s climate change policies, promising that the measure would create jobs in the fossil fuel industry.

Trump signed the document titled the “Energy Independence Executive Order” at the headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency  on April 28, 2017, suspending more than half a dozen measures enacted by former President Barack Obama.

In June last year, Trump announced that he would pull the United States out of the 2015 the Paris Climate Agreement to fight climate change, characterizing the decision as "a reassertion of American sovereignty."

The move drew rebuke from Democrats at home and world leaders who had pressed Trump not to abandon the 197-nation accord.

Leading American intellectual Noam Chomsky has predicted the presidency of Trump would be particularly damaging to environment since he does not believe in climate science. He has said Trump is profoundly committed to destroying planet Earth.

The Paris climate agreement, which deals with greenhouse gases emissions mitigation, adaptation and finance starting in the year 2020, was negotiated by representatives of nearly 200 countries in Paris and adopted by consensus on December 12, 2015.
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