• Barack Obama condemned GOP politicians, including Donald Trump, who deny climate science.
• He criticized the GOP for not only “sitting on the sidelines” but for expressing “active hostility to climate science”.
• Speaking in Glasgow, the former president said the United States had “more vigorous opposition to the climate than in many other places”.

Former President Barack Obama condemned Republican politicians, including former President Donald Trump, who denied climate science during his speech at the international climate summit in Glasgow on Monday.

Obama said the United States should lead the world in the fight against global warming. But his administration’s efforts to deal with the climate crisis have been hurt by Republican lawmakers who “have decided not only to sit on the sidelines” but to express “active hostility to climate science.” He said President Joe Biden grapples with the same obstructionism.

“Of course, in the United States, some of our progress was stalled when my successor decided to unilaterally withdraw from the Paris Agreement during his first year in office,” Obama said, referring to the decision. controversial Trump. “I wasn’t really happy with that.”

Obama acknowledged that other world leaders face similar climate challenges in their countries, but argued that the United States has “more vigorous opposition to climate than in many other places.”

The former president pointed out that Republicans have not always denied climate science or hindered action on the issue, suggesting that their anti-science positions are now political.

“I welcome any faction within the Republican Party in the United States that takes climate change seriously,” Obama said. “And it may be a rare breed now, but keep in mind that such elected officials were commonplace, existed before. President George HW Bush, a Republican, was one of the first US presidents to officially recognize the threat of climate change, was a signatory to the Rio Accord.

Obama praised the current administration’s efforts to pass major anti-climate provisions in the Build Back Better Act. He said that under Biden, “the US government is once again engaged and ready to take a leadership role” in the fight against climate change.

Leading Republicans in Washington continue to deny the scientific facts that climate change is largely caused by human activity and will have catastrophic effects around the world if greenhouse gas emissions are not significantly reduced. Republicans often mistakenly claim that climate change is natural and unaffected by humans.

Trump pulled the United States out of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, overturned hundreds of environmental regulations, approved the Keystone XL pipeline, and called climate change a “hoax.”

House Republican Whip Steve Scalise, the second-highest-ranking Republican in the House, last week denied climate science and dismissed the evidence showing that climate change is making natural disasters, including hurricanes and forest fires, more severe and more frequent.

“Carbon emissions have been around since before humans walked the earth,” he told reporters. “It’s hotter, it’s colder, that’s what we call Mother Nature.”

In July, Senator Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin, called climate change “bullshit”.