President Donald Trump would be willing to sign the US back up to the Paris climate accord, but only if the treaty undergoes major change, he has said in comments published on Sunday.
Trump was met with global condemnation when he announced in June 2017 that the United States was pulling out of the Paris climate agreement, painting it a “bad deal” for the US economy.
While the president remains firm in his criticism of the historic accord, which was signed by his predecessor Barack Obama, he said he would be willing to sign up to a revamped deal.
“The Paris accord, for us, would have been a disaster,” he told Britain’s ITV channel in an interviewed to be aired late on Sunday in the UK.
“If they made a good deal … there’s always a chance we’d get back,” Trump added, describing the current agreement as “terrible” and “unfair” to the US.
The landmark treaty was agreed by 197 nations in 2015 after intense negotiations in Paris, where all countries made voluntary carbon-cutting pledges running to 2030.
“If somebody said, go back into the Paris accord, it would have to be a completely different deal because we had a horrible deal,” Trump said, according to extracts of the interview.
“Would I go back in? Yeah, I’d go back in … I would love to. I like, as you know, Emmanuel [Macron].”
Trump suggested the climate had been cooling as well as warming and asserted – wrongly – that ice at the poles has not been shrinking as predicted.
“The ice caps were going to melt, they were going to be gone by now, but now they’re setting records,” he said.
That assessment remarks does not match what data shows and scientists say.
The world has not been cooling except for normal day-to-day weather variations; it has been just the opposite. And there have been far more records for shrinking ice on the top and the bottom of the world than growing, despite what the president claimed.
Earlier this month Trump said the US could “conceivably” return to the deal under more favourable terms, raising questions about whether he was bluffing about pulling out of the Paris deal in a bid for easier emissions targets.
Agence France-Presse and Reuters contributed to this report
