-President Trump has said
he will pull the United States out
of the Paris climate-change accord.
-President Trump knows that America needs
all our nation's energy resources
to power our homes, power our economy,
and really to power our future.
-Protect our future!
-If we don't do anything, no one else will,
and that's what we're feeling right now.
-Climate change has got to go!
Hey hey, ho ho!
-You say you love your children above all else,
and yet you are stealing their future
in front of their very eyes.
-[indistinct shouting]
[applause]
-I was there when Trump won the election
and when he began to name the people he wanted
in these really important environmental roles.
-It is an honor to appear before this esteemed Senate committee
on energy and natural resources.
-The false paradigm that if you're pro-energy,
you're anti-environment,
and if you're pro-environment, you're anti-energy.
I utterly reject that narrative.
-It became very clear in the weeks to follow
that the administration was choosing
a very different set of players
and that nothing embodied this more than Scott Pruitt.
-You've joined or filed 14 lawsuits against the EPA.
-He's put somebody in place
who has actually defunded or led to the defunding
of the environmental-protection unit within your own agency.
-It was a 180 shift.
You went from people who very much wanted to do things
to help combat climate change
and had an environmental view that was very different
than the people who were coming in.
-As you know, I'm here to announce
that those standards that were set
that we are obligated to evaluate,
we are determining -- I am determining
that those standards are inappropriate
and should be revised.
-He immediately agreed to, for example,
revisit tighter tailpipe emissions for cars and trucks,
which in fact was the most significant climate policy
adopted under the Obama administration.
So you saw a flurry of activity across a range of areas
where essentially, EPA administrator Pruitt
and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke
were taking aim at almost anything significant
that the previous administration had done
on energy and the environment.
[applause]
-The United States will withdraw from the Paris climate accord.
-The US have to have a big voice,
and the US used to be a leader, and that evaporated.
And the impact of that
is that it sort of tacitly gave permission
to other countries maybe to not do as much as they would have.
Other countries said
the ambition isn't there without the United States.
The world needs the United States.
Obviously, the Paris accord went on.
Countries kept pushing forward with this.
But it felt different and it looked different
without the United States as a real part of it.
♪♪
I think there were several things at work,
and one of them was
just a different philosophy about government,
that government shouldn't try to dictate
how people cut their carbon emissions
or how companies regulate
different emissions of pollutants
that they put into the air
in the way that Democrats had traditionally done.
So there were some longstanding ideological differences
about the role government should play.
♪♪
-He just said he was gonna want to get out of it
if he was elected, and I thought,
if he says that to the voters
and that's what everybody is expecting,
that's what he should do.
I don't see the benefit from it, staying in it,
so why stay in it, you know?
-Decisions made thousands of miles away,
driven by ideology or money or all sorts of things,
really has an impact on people's everyday lives,
and that they themselves don't necessarily have easy answers
for how to move forward.
-And I see again the forest fires are starting.
They're starting again in California.
I said, "You got to clean your floors,
you got to clean your forests."
They have many, many years of leaves and broken trees.
And they're, like -- like, so flammable.
You touch them, and it goes up.
I've been telling them this now for three years.
But they don't want to listen. "The environment."
[indistinct conversations]
-My name is Greta Thunberg.
I am 15 years old, and I'm from Sweden.
I'll speak on behalf of climate justice now.
-I was at a UN climate conference
in 2018 in Poland -- in a small town in Poland.
And people were talking about this young woman
who was kind of mesmerizing to listen to
and very blunt.
-You said you hear us and that you understand the urgency.
But no matter how sad and angry I am,
I do not want to believe that,
because if you really understood the situation,
and still kept on failing to act,
then you would be evil, and that I refuse to believe.
-Keep that carbon in the soil! No more coal!
-In the last few years, millions of young people
marching in the streets, demanding more climate action,
demanding governments to take this seriously.
And in some ways, I think Trump and his dismissal
of climate change and climate science
probably contributed to the rise of that.
But in some ways, that movement may have led
to whatever platform Joe Biden has now come to
in making this a priority.
So it'll be interesting to see
what the next four years that continues.
-That's one I'm going to do while you're all here --
is a commitment I made
that we're going to rejoin the Paris Climate Accord
as of today.
[wind blowing]
-The windows were moving a lot.
Water was coming in from everywhere.
We started having leaks, The windows were opening up.
It was brutal.
It was a very traumatic experience.
♪♪
-If only for the fact that the Trump administration
has done a lot to influence environmental policy in the US,
when it comes to rolling back, by our count,
135 or more environmental regulations --
and this spans water rules, air-quality rules,
wildlife and our public lands, and drilling --
and so it's been kind of like
drinking from the proverbial fire hose,
just in covering the policy.
-One of the biggest impacts we'll see,
regardless of the lawsuits to follow
and all the different activities
that the next administration will do
is the United States will have spent four years
not grappling with climate change.
And more than anything,
that will translate into higher greenhouse gas emissions.
It may translate into how some Americans view
what we should do as the path forward.
That is the real legacy that's incontrovertible,
no matter what comes next.
♪♪
[crowd chanting indistinctly]