Donald
Trump says he believes there is ‘some connectivity’ between
humans and climate change in major U-turn
The
President-elect had suggested climate change was a 'hoax'
Andrew Buncombe New
York
It is hard to keep
up with the pace of change in the mind of Donald Trump.
Just hours after
announcing he was not going to pursue an investigation of Hillary
Clinton over her use of a personal email server, he indicated another
important U-turn - this time in regard to climate.
During the campaign,
Mr Trump has suggested climate change was nothing more than a “hoax”,
and that the so-called myth may have been started by the Chinese.
However, in a
conversation with journalists from the New York Times on Tuesday, he
indicated he had rethought the matter.
Asked if thought
human activity was linked to climate change; he responded: “I think
there is some connectivity. Some, something. It depends on how much.”
He also said he
would keep an open mind on whether he would pull the US out of a
landmark international climate change deal.
During his
presidential campaign, Mr Trump repeatedly said he would withdraw
from the 2015 Paris climate accord. But on Tuesday, at a meeting with
reporters that itself experienced a U-turn in regard to whether or
not it would even take place, he said: “I’m looking at it very
closely. I have an open mind to it.”
Mr Trump, who has
been holed up for days in Trump Tower in New York as he puts together
a team for his administration, told the reporters that he was also
thinking about climate change in regard to American competitiveness
and “how much it will cost our companies”.
He also said he
thought clean energy was “very important”.
Travis Nichols, a
spokesman for Greenpeace, told The Independent that regardless of
what Mr Trump had said to the newspaper, 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.
Mr Trump told Fox
News in January: “I think that climate change is just a very, very
expensive form of tax. A lot of people are making a lot of money. I
know a lot about climate change….I’ve received environmental
awards.”
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