On Thursday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) lauded some of America’s greatest enemies, saying they do more to combat climate change than the Trump administration.
Schumer cited Syria, North Korea, and Iran, ranting about GOP legislators, according to The Washington Free Beacon, stating:
They’re taking their lead from the president, a man who is so willfully ignorant and foolish that he thinks he’s clever by ridiculing the global scientific consensus on climate change whenever it snows. Well, the American people are not laughing. They weren’t laughing when a U.S. Senator brought a snowball to the floor of this chamber to mock climate science. They weren’t laughing when President Trump called climate change a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. The rest of the world isn’t laughing either, not when basically every country in the world, including Syria, North Korea, Iran are working together to reduce carbon emissions while the Trump administration has forced the United States to sit on the sidelines.
The Beacon noted that in December, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg admitted that although the Trump administration pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement, America is still meeting the agreement’s goals. Speaking on “Meet the Press,” Bloomberg answered host Chuck Todd’s question as to what would happen if the U.S. decided to rejoin the agreement by asserting, “Not a lot because we are halfway there towards meeting our goals already. Somebody said ‘Oh, you know, you’re never going to get this. It’s ridiculous to think that America is going to meet its goals.’ We’re halfway there already and there’s seven years left to go. The economics of coal means no one will stop the reduction in the amount of coal. We’ve done a bunch of things that we promised to do under that agreement that Trump said we’re not going to do; he walked away.”
Schumer has his own issues as he’s played footsie regarding Iran; he waited, not wanting to go against his party’s president, Barack Obama, until the disastrous Iran nuclear deal was sure of passage, then came out against it. Then after President Trump pulled out of the deal, Schumer said, “The right thing to do would have been to try and come up with our allies with an agreement on those issues and let the nuclear part of this continue as is because it’s not being violated in any way.”
And on Syria, Schumer has also hedged his bets: in 2013, he stated that he wouldn’t oppose Russia’s involvement in Syria, saying, “Obviously, we’re going to have to be real careful. Neither Assad nor Putin is to be trusted. … I am not a fan of Putin. I think he does many, many bad things in his country and elsewhere, but if he finds it is in his interest to come clean here and help, it’s a good thing.”
But hey, forget the fact that North Korea is a giant prison camp, that Iran is the world’s largest sponsor of terrorism, and Syria is a disaster for human rights: Schumer knows what’s important.