Since Donald Trump first invoked “very fine people on both sides” following a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the phrase has become something of a stand-in for the president’s blind equivocation. So it made perfect sense that he deployed it again in a recent interview with the Associated Press, in response to a question about climate change. “You have scientists on both sides of the issue. And I agree the climate changes, but it goes back and forth, back and forth. So we’ll see.” He reiterated his point seconds later: “I mean, you have scientists on both sides of it. My uncle was a great professor at M.I.T. for many years. Dr. John Trump. And I didn’t talk to him about this particular subject, but I have a natural instinct for science, and I will say that you have scientists on both sides of the picture.”

He did not explicitly say that the landmark report published last week by the 91 scientists who make up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is, in his eyes, hopelessly partisan, and therefore bunk. But of course, he didn’t have to. The report goes against the Republican line in almost every respect, outlining the dire consequences of allowing warming to surpass 1.5 degrees Celsius, which include mass poverty, spikes in disease, a blight on crops, and the extinction of whole species. To maintain warming at a manageable 1.5 degrees, it states, international governments must enact sweeping changes across industries like architecture, energy systems, and shipping. “Human activities,” the report’s writers explain, “have already caused the global mean temperature to increase as much as 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels . . . If warming continues at its current rate, it could reach 1.5 degrees by the time a child who is now a toddler starts high school.”

Not only would the recommended changes, such as heavily taxing carbon-dioxide emissions, be difficult to implement in an economic behemoth like the United States, the second largest greenhouse-gas emitter behind China, they would also require an ideological inversion from Trump, who has repeatedly questioned the science behind climate change, vowed to revive the coal industry, and withdrawn from agreements such as the Paris climate accord, which he framed to the A.P. as a callous attempt to manipulate the United States. “If we would have, as an example, entered certain agreements with other countries, I actually think that we’re doing it so they could have an economic advantage,” he said. “Because we would have had a tremendous—we would have been at a tremendous economic disadvantage if we entered into certain agreements.”

Heads of state will attempt to overcome the president’s idiocy in December, when they congregate in Poland for the next round of U.N. Climate Change talks—an operation that the White House, whose response to the report has been tepid, will likely view as a Trojan horse, designed to extract cash from the U.S. and weaken its jobs market. “I know some people might not think of me as that, but I’m an environmentalist,” Trump said Wednesday. “Everything I want and everything I have is clean. Clean is very important—water, air. But I also want jobs for our country.”