WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claimed on Tuesday that it was difficult to determine the actual causes of climate change, dismissing decades of science that has attributed global warming to the burning of fossil fuels. He instead called on international financial institutions to focus their attention on economic growth and alleviating poverty.
The comments came in remarks on the sidelines of the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Bessent had previously ordered the World Bank to remove some of its climate finance targets and finance “all affordable and reliable sources of energy” including gas, oil and coal.
The Trump administration has reversed most of the spending on clean energy that was underway during the Biden administration and pushed ahead with policies that end restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions and aim to ramp up domestic production of fossil fuels.
President Donald Trump last year called global warming a “hoax” and a “con job.” While the Treasury secretary did not go that far, his comments contradicted the scientific consensus about why the world’s climate is changing.
“Yes, the climate does change,” Bessent said, adding that “we are going through cycles, and I believe that it is very difficult to deconstruct the reasons around why anything changes.”
Leading scientists have rejected claims like Bessent’s, and noted that natural factors like the sun, volcanic eruptions and orbital cycles would be cooling the Earth if not for human activity. Instead, about 200 years ago, after the start of the Industrial Revolution, the direction of global temperatures reversed and began rapidly warming.
“The only reason for the observed warming are human activities, and the biggest of those activities are the emissions of heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuels,” said Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University.
Bessent’s partner in the discussion was Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish academic who argues that climate change is occurring but is not a crisis, and that poor nations require fossil fuels to develop.
“The money that the World Bank spends on the solar panel can’t be invested in health care or education,” Lomborg said, arguing the institutions “need to get back to making rational priorities.”
Bessent agreed and said policymakers instead needed to focus on how to “increase resiliency.”
“We cannot have these elite beliefs get in the way,” Bessent said, referring to climate change.
This article originally appeared in .
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