On April 14, 2026, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made inaccurate remarks about climate change at the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, saying “[w]e are going through cycles, and I believe that it is very difficult to deconstruct the reasons around why anything changes.” In his remarks, Bessent said that global financial institutions should focus on economic development and that “[w]e cannot have these elite beliefs get in the way.”
There is widespread scientific consensus that human activity causes climate change. Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University, said “[t]he only reason for the observed warming [is] human activities, and the biggest of those activities are the emissions of heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuels.”