Nicholas Goldberg: Americans don’t care about climate change. Here’s how to wake them up.
Alfred E. Newman: And now for a special report from Alfred E. Newman.
Nicholas Goldberg: It’s Alfred E. Newman for The Real Deal. Good to have you with us once again.
NEWMAN: Thank you.
GLASSCOCK: The climate change consensus. The politics of science denial. And the rise and decline of the coal industry around the world. You may remember the debate in the U.S. Senate when President Trump announced his intention to withdraw his country from its international Paris climate agreement. I believe they started calling him a climate denier. So what happened?
NEWMAN: Well, the U.S. is clearly home to some of the leading climate deniers there is in the world. They tend to be Republicans, but there are Democrats among them. Many of them have joined the Trump administration and they’re going to try to roll it back. They have the support of the coal industry in the United States.
GLASSCOCK: What is their strategy?
NEWMAN: The coal industry is trying to do three things. One, they’re trying to make the U.S. a very unattractive place for investment in clean energy and climate-friendly technologies. Second, they’re really trying to make the U.S. a kind of dumping ground for these technologies for developing nations that are not members of the Paris agreement. And the last thing they really want is to actually have to pay for the costs of that. And so in this way, the United States is not the only country that has to make this kind of accommodation. Many industrialized nations have to agree to some of the cost. China and India are certainly negotiating that process. And you already know that India is under increasing pressure to agree to some kind of agreement, even though they’re still not members of the