Three days after Donald Trump announced that the US would pull out of the Paris climate accord, senior members of his administration could not present a united front in response to questions about the president’s beliefs on climate change.

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Trump has repeatedly called climate change a hoax, tweeting in 2012 that it was “created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive”.

UN ambassador Nikki Haley said in interviews broadcast Sunday that Trump “believes the climate is changing”, partly because of pollution. But Scott Pruitt, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), passed up five chances to say whether Trump subscribed to such mainstream scientific belief.

Asked by State of the Union host Jake Tapper if saying the Chinese invented climate change to achieve an economic advantage was “a big box of crazy”, Haley said: “President Trump believes the climate is changing and he believes pollutants are part of that equation. So that is the fact. That is where we are. That’s where it stands.

“He knows that it’s changing and the US has to be responsible for it and that’s what we’re going to do. Just because we got out of a club doesn’t mean we don’t care about it.”

On CBS’s Face the Nation, Haley added that Trump was “absolutely intent on making sure that we have clean air, clean water, that he makes sure that we’re doing everything we can to keep America’s moral compass in the world when it comes to the environment”.

On ABC’s This Week, however, Pruitt responded to host George Stephanopoulos’s first question on the subject by saying: “I think the president made it clear that the climate changes. And I think what needs to be emphasised here with respect to the Paris accord was about the efficacy of the agreement as it relates to the environment, how it impacts the economy.

“The president said on Thursday that engagement internationally is something that’s going to continue but what Paris represents is a bad deal for this country and as such is something we need to exit.”

Pruitt was asked if it mattered whether the president said climate change was a hoax. He said: “With respect to the Paris accord, the focus is on the efficacy, the merits of the deal and the demerits of the deal. The president indicated very clearly that engagement by this country internationally is going to continue.”

Pruitt also heralded US efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, saying: “We’re leading by example … we are leading with action, not words.” The former Oklahoma attorney general, who regularly sued the EPA in that role, has said carbon dioxide emissions are not a primary cause of global warming, a position rejected by the vast majority of climate scientists.

Stephanopoulos asked Pruitt a third time why the president couldn’t say openly whether he believed in manmade contributions to climate change.

“Well, frankly, I think the whole question is an effort to get it off the point and the issue of whether Paris is good for this country or not,” said Pruitt. “And the president has indicated the climate changes.”

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Asked a fourth time, Pruitt said: “What matters is what you do about it. What matters is what steps you take to address CO2 reductions. And what matters when you look at Paris is that China and India didn’t take any steps, while this country did. The environmental left has a very short memory. When Paris was executed they criticised it, said it did not hold China and India accountable.”

Stephanopoulos tried a fifth and final pass: “Do you know if President Trump still believes climate change is a hoax?”

“Our discussion has been about the efficacy of the agreement,” Pruitt said. “That’s what we spent the last several weeks focused upon. He put America first. He said he could put jobs and the environment first, by the way.”

The Paris accord, agreed in 2015 and signed in 2016 under the Obama administration, sets voluntary targets for the reduction of emissions which cause climate change. The US will join only Syria and Nicaragua – the former racked by civil war, the latter believing the terms of the deal not strict enough – on the sidelines.

The former vice-president and environmental campaigner Al Gore appeared across the political talk shows on Sunday. On CNN, he called the decision to pull out of the Paris deal “reckless” and “indefensible”.

“It undermines America’s standing in the world,” Gore said. “It threatens the ability of humanity to solve the climate crisis in time.”

Gore met Trump and his daughter, Ivanka, in New York City in December, to discuss the president-elect’s campaign-trail threats to leave the Paris deal.

Saying he had spoken to the president’s daughter a number of times since then, Gore added: “I thought that he would come to his senses on it, but he didn’t.”