China tells Trump that climate change is no hoax it invented

China couldn’t have invented global warming as a hoax to harm US competitiveness because it was Donald Trump’s Republican predecessors who started climate negotiations in the 1980s, China’s Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin said. US Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H W Bush supported the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in initiating global warming talks even before China knew that negotiations to cut pollution were starting, Liu told reporters at United Nations talks on Wednesday in Marrakech, Morocco. Ministers and government officials from almost 200 countries gathered in Marrakech this week are awaiting a decision by President-elect Trump on whether he will pull the US out of the Paris Agreement to tackle climate change. The tycoon tweeted in 2012 that the concept of global warming “was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.” China’s envoy rejected that view. “If you look at the history of climate change negotiations, actually it was initiated by the IPCC with the support of the Republicans during the Reagan and senior Bush administration during the late 1980s,” Liu told reporters during an hour-long briefing. (Jessica Shankleman/Bloomberg)