US PRESIDENT DONALD Trump has warned that the deal taking Britain out of the European Union may inadvertently hamper trade between London and Washington.
“Sounds like a great deal for the EU,” he said at the White House, before adding that “we have to take a look at seriously whether or not the UK is allowed to trade”.
“You know, right now, if you look at the deal, they may not be able to trade with us, and that wouldn’t be a good thing,” he said.
“I don’t think they want that at all. That would be a very big negative for the deal.”
He expressed hope that Prime Minister Theresa May will “be able to do something about that.”
The British leader on Sunday closed 17 months of painful talks with Brussels by sealing Brexit arrangements with the 27 other EU heads of state and government.
However, May faces a difficult task getting parliamentary approval for the deal.
‘I don’t believe it’
Trump also told reporters that he doesn’t believe his own government’s report last week warning of massive economic losses if carbon emissions continue to feed climate change unchecked.
“I don’t believe it,” Trump said at the White House, adding that the United States would not take measures to cut emissions if the same was not done in other countries.
Trump said he had read “some” of the report and that it was “fine.”
However, he rejected the central warning in the National Climate Assessment, which said there will be hundreds of billions of dollars in losses by the end of the century due to climate change “without substantial and sustained global mitigation.”
“No, no, I don’t believe it,” he repeated.
“You’re going to have to have China and Japan and all of Asia and all of these other countries, you know. It addresses our country,” he said.
Right now, we’re at the cleanest we’ve ever been. And that’s very important to me. But if we’re clean, but every other place on Earth is dirty, that’s not so good. So I want clean air, I want clean water, very important.
According to the report, released Friday, climate change will “cause growing losses to American infrastructure and property and impede the rate of economic growth over this century.”
The effects will spill into global trade, hitting import and export prices and US businesses with overseas operations and supply chains, it added.
Trump has long said he distrusts the consensus by nearly all the world’s respected climate scientists on the link between human activity and rising temperatures, as well as other damaging climate change phenomena.
Since becoming president in 2016 he has pulled the United States out of the international Paris Agreement on attempting to bring down global temperatures, and torn up a raft of environmental protection laws, saying the US economy needs the boost.
In October, Trump said during a visit to inspect hurricane damage in the southern state of Georgia that climate change “is going to go back and forth,” rather than be permanent.
He also gave a lukewarm reaction to publication of a major UN report warning in October of global warming-caused chaos, saying “I want to look who drew it, you know, which groups drew it, because I can give you reports that are fabulous and I can give you reports that aren’t so good.”
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