During his trip to the United Kingdom, President Donald Trump met with Charles, Prince of Wales, heir to the royal throne. The two talked a great deal about climate change, according to the president — a revelation that broke protocols.
It’s a generally-recognized tradition that politicians, from abroad or even at home in the UK, do not reveal what they’ve discussed with royal family members. Yet Trump, who spoke with “Good Morning Britain” host Piers Morgan (who coincidentally once appeared on Trump’s reality show “The Celebrity Apprentice”), couldn’t help himself, according to reporting from The Daily Beast.
The prince has long-been a proponent of a healthier, more sustainable planet. As Time Magazine once reported, he’s been actively pushing to fight global climate change since at least 1990 (when it was previously more commonly known as “global warming”).
Trump tells Prince Charles US has "clean" climate. “It’s even getting better because I agree with that we want the best water, the cleanest water. It’s crystal clean, has to be crystal clean clear.” https://t.co/752K0dDEoC pic.twitter.com/LzIwJXqke4
— Jim Roberts (@nycjim) June 5, 2019
Trump noted Charles’s passion in his interview with Morgan.
“He is really into climate change and I think that’s great,” Trump said. “What he really wants and what he really feels warmly about is the future. He wants to make sure future generations have climate that is good climate, as opposed to a disaster, and I agree.”
Charles and Trump spoke on the subject for around 90 minutes, the president said. And while discussion on climate change was “great,” Trump made sure to tell Charles, even if it was real, it wasn’t anything America was responsible for.
“I did say, ‘Well, the United States right now has among the cleanest climates there are based on all statistics,'” Trump said he told Charles. “And it’s even getting better because I agree with that we want the best water, the cleanest water. It’s crystal clean, has to be crystal clean clear.”
Trump’s claims to the prince here are dubious, at best. The U.S. has expanded exploration for fossil fuels, loosened efficiency standards for vehicles, dropped out of the Paris climate accords, and weakened federal rules to protect wetlands from run-off polution, among other things, The Guardian reported. In reality, the U.S. is the second-biggest producer of greenhouse gases in the world.
Trump wouldn’t give Morgan a definitive answer on whether he himself believed climate change was real or not, voicing skepticism on the issue because it’s had terminology name changes over the years.
“Don’t forget, it used to be called global warming, that wasn’t working, then it was called climate change, now it’s actually called extreme weather, because with extreme weather you can’t miss,” Trump pointed out.
According to NASA — an agency that Trump, as president, technically oversees — Climate change is real, and “climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities.”