A Chinese official on Wednesday rejected Donald Trump’s charge that China invented climate change as a hoax.
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According to a Bloomberg report, Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin said his country couldn’t have invented climate change because former Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were the ones who started global warming talks in the 1980s. Trump famously tweeted years ago that global warming is a hoax created by the Chinese to harm American manufacturing.
Liu said the early involvement of American presidents shows the Chinese weren’t trying to harm U.S. industries.
“If you look at the history of climate change negotiations, actually it was initiated by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] with the support of the Republicans during the Reagan and senior Bush administration during the late 1980s,” Liu said, according to the report.
Countries from around the world are meeting in Morocco for their annual meeting on climate change. This year’s meeting is focused on implementation of the Paris Agreement, the world’s first climate change agreement that was agreed to last year.
Trump has threatened to pull the U.S. out of the agreement and end Obama regulations meant to ensure compliance.
The Obama administration and the Chinese government have worked closely on climate change policy as one of the areas the two countries can agree on. President Xi Jinping said China would keep to its commitments regardless of what America does.
“Of course we’re still expecting developed countries, including the United States, will continue to take the lead on mitigating climate change,” he said.
