Since he was elected president, Donald Trump has made some significant reversals regarding is rhetoric from the campaign, and one of them involves his stance on climate change.
Within hours of announcing that he was no longer interested in pursuing an investigation into Hillary Clinton‘s email server, Trump told journalists from the New York Times that he’d given some more thought to the issue of climate change and its connection to human activity, saying, “I think there is some connectivity. Some, something. It depends on how much.”
He also seemed to walk back his campaign threat of withdrawing from the 2015 Paris climate deal, saying, “I’m looking at it very closely. I have an open mind to it.”
Trump added that he thinks clean energy is “very important.”
"Clean air is vitally important," Trump says about climate change. Says he is keeping "an open mind."
— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) November 22, 2016
But according to Greenpeace spokesman Travis Nichols, we’re far from being out of the woods on the climate issue when it comes to the incoming Trump administration.
From The Independent:
…regardless of what Mr Trump had said to the [New York Times], the fact he had appointed a series of climate change deniers and oil industry lobbyists to his transition team indicated his administration would still be in “climate denial”.
Mr Trump’s notoriety as a climate change denier dates back to 2012 when he said in a tweet: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.”
During the election campaign, he positioned himself as a defender of traditional industries, such as coal mining, and mocked Hillary Clinton’s talk of the need to invest in alternative energy.
“I think that climate change is just a very, very expensive form of tax,” Trump told Fox News back in January. “A lot of people are making a lot of money. I know a lot about climate change… I’ve received environmental awards.”
Featured image via Flickr
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