Former General Electric Chairman and CEO Jack Welch said President Barack Obama’s “wacky” obsession with climate change is hurting the U.S. economy.
Welch described the Obama administration's focus on combating climate change as "radical behavior" that's difficult to rationalize amid all the other problems facing the planet.
Welch told
CNBC on Thursday that Obama’s quest to curb climate change triggers a ripple effect into "all kinds of policies throughout the different agencies" of a government which should be focused on more-pressing concerns.
“My frustration comes from the lack of growth,” Welch said of the economy. "You get an economy that won't move. You get ozone regs that are wacky," he said.
"You [also] get a reduced military," he added, saying the U.S. needs to rebuild its national defenses to fight global terror threats.
"You can't be sitting here with the real threat of a caliphate and ISIL ... and talking about climate change."
Welch said he's not a climate-change denier, but he feels the "cost of doing it; it's got to be more balanced."
Welch said the president should be most concerned about fueling robust economic growth. "In my view, it's a massive deregulation. It's all of the above. It's deregulation. It's [reforming] taxes."
"What we've got is a habitualized low-growth environment," said Welch. "Most of these guys haven't been CEOs in good times," he said of top business officials he deals with.
Welch said that from his experience, any company involved with oil has been “squeezed and murdered” by crude’s price plunge. From what Welch has witnessed, he said building small warehouses and any business “related to the internet” seems to be thriving.
“But the idea of industrial America? It is brutal out there. And you're not seeing manufacturing industrial America go anywhere right now.”
The climate change battle is also a crucial issue in the presidential election.
Billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer is spending big money in California to skewer presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, the latest volley in a barrage of anti-Trump advertising that has saturated TV airwaves,
NBC News reported.
Steyer, who has so far contributed $24 million to his personal super PAC, NextGen Climate Action Committee, is among the top contributors to all super PACs so far this election.
NextGen Climate Action Committee says it acts "politically to prevent climate disaster and promote prosperity for every American."
For his part, Trump has vowed to roll back some of America's most ambitious environmental policies, actions that he said would revive the ailing U.S. oil and coal industries and bolster national security.
Among the proposals, Trump said he would pull the United States out of the U.N. global climate accord, approve the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada and rescind measures by President Barack Obama to cut U.S. emissions and protect waterways from industrial pollution,
Reuters reported.
"Any regulation that's outdated, unnecessary, bad for workers or contrary to the national interest will be scrapped and scrapped completely," Trump told about 7,700 people at the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference in Bismarck, the capital of oil-rich North Dakota. "We're going to do all this while taking proper regard for rational environmental concerns."
Any Republican president might seek to undo Obama's domestic plans to cut emissions by 26-28 percent by 2025 below 2005 levels, said Mogens Lykketoft of Denmark, current president of the 193-nation United Nations General Assembly,
Reuters reported.
And plans by Obama, a Democrat, to cut emissions from power plants could also face legal challenges that end up being decided by the Supreme Court.
(Newsmax wire services contributed to this report).
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