Biden says Trump will ‘undo’ progress on tackling climate crisis

Joe Biden warned that Donald Trump would undo all of his work on the climate crisis if he won the US presidential election even as the former president claimed to have the best “environmental numbers” when he was in office.

The first presidential debate ahead of the election in November saw little attention paid to the climate crisis, despite the US having been battered by several extreme weather events, such as heatwaves and storms in recent weeks.

Asked what he would do to deal with the climate crisis, Mr Trump initially deflected. When moderator Dana Bash asked him again, the former president said: “I want absolutely immaculate clean water and absolutely clean air.”

“And we had it. We had H2O, we had the best numbers ever, and we were using all forms of energy, everything.”

Mr Trump said his advisers told him moments before he walked onto the stage that his presidency oversaw “the best environmental numbers ever”. He did not elaborate.

Mr Biden hit back: “I don’t know where the h*** he has been.”

The sitting president said he had enacted “the most extensive climate change legislation in history”, a reference to the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which seeks to tackle domestic inflation due to global energy crisis while tackling the climate crisis. The law is expected to cut the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by up to 42 per cent by 2030.

Mr Biden claimed that Mr Trump did not do “a damn thing for the environment” as president and now “wants to undo all that I’ve done”.

Mr Trump last month reportedly promised to rollback Mr Biden’s environmental regulations if oil and gas executives donated $1bn to his presidential campaign.

Mr Biden also noted that Mr Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accord, which the