Trump officials at the G7 Summit think climate change is a 'niche' issue

Emmanuel Macron designed a varied G7 Summit which will address some of the most salient issues facing the world today including gender inequality and climate - something Trump’s officials think are ‘niche’ issues.

The US president joined Macron for lunch at the Hotel du Palais on Saturday prior to the commencement of the G7 Summit, where he called the French president a “friend” and bragged about a “special relationship between America and France.

The Summit is being held in the beach town on Biarritz in the south of France and will have representatives from countries all over the world in attendance.

Although Trump was filled with praise towards Macron, who organised the global event, his administration were less complementary.

According to the New York Times, Trump’s team were privately and publicly critical of the French president, and complained that the focus of the summit was more on “niche issues” such as climate change, income and gender inequality and African development, rather than global economic challenges.

Trump’s administration accused Macron’s aides of ignoring their requests to focus on the summit, which begins on Monday, on national security and the economy.

“France, this year’s host, wants the Group of 7 to stay silent on these core economic issues,” Larry Kudlow, the director of Trump’s National Economic Council, wrote in an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal as the president arrived in Biarritz.

Kudlow accused the French of focusing on “politically correct bromides” and said the Group of 7 was in danger of losing its way. “Trade and the global economy have gotten short shrift.”

In 2018 Donald Trump cast doubt on a report by the US government warning of the detrimental effects from climate change.

Asked about the findings that unchecked global warming would negatively impact the US economy, he said: “I don’t believe it.”

You're going to have to have China and Japan and all of Asia and all these other countries, you know, it [the report] addresses our country.

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.

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