Think back, if you will, to the halcyon days of 2012, when Donald Trump hadn’t yet strangled the presidency with his small, grubby orange hands. “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive,” he tweeted on November 6 of that year.
Today—almost exactly four years later—China finally chimed in. Shockingly, it does not endorse Donald Trump’s version of events.
According to China’s Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin, the country couldn’t possibly have invented climate change, because American presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were talking about climate change negotiations long before China knew about them.
“If you look at the history of climate change negotiations, actually it was initiated by the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] with the support of the Republicans during the Reagan and senior Bush administration during the late 1980s,” he told reporters during United Nations talks in Morocco today.
Unfortunately, he did not push back on the idea that climate change itself is a hoax, which probably would have been helpful.
However, China’s stance on global warming has been looking better and better ever since Donald Trump promised to light the Paris Agreement on fire, among other disastrous environment-related statements, including one in which he vowed to get rid of the “Department of Environmental.”
Can we get off this horrible ride yet, mom?