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President Trump announced on Thursday his intentions to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement.
Reactions were split, with an overwhelming number of Republicans like Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) supporting the measure. In a Thursday interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Paul praised Trump’s actions.
After mentioning the agreement would threaten more jobs in the energy sector, the senator and the CNN anchor had a spat over climate change facts.
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Paul criticized a portion of the agreement the required the US to reduce its carbon footprint by 20 percent — meaning Americans would either need to reduce their energy output or convert to other energy sources that may or may not be as available — while China did not have to reduce its carbon footprint at all.
“How much should the U.S. reduce its carbon footprint?” Tapper asked.
“I don’t know if anybody can tell you right offhand the number,” Paul replied. “I should say we should try to constrain pollution. We should try to control pollution and I think we have been doing that for about 50 to 60 years.”
Paul went on to criticize climate change alarmists and suggested asking which percentages of climate change came from human activity and how much of it was simply natural. He also stated his belief that some aspects of climate change were caused by human activity.
Tapper said that Paul could see the effects of climate change on NASA’s website. Paul refuted the accuracy of modeling, noting continuous readjustments in practices and discrepancies in predictions.
Tapper then mentioned rising temperatures, shrinking glaciers, disappearing ice and rising sea levels. Paul also refuted this by speaking about the shallower seas that allowed early humans to cross the Bering Land Bridge, thousands of years before energy dependence.
Paul again spoke of the models bring used to predict the future, which he noted was “notoriously difficult.”
