Trump rethinks climate stance
NEW YORK— US Presidentelect Donald Trump said on Tuesday he was keeping an open mind on whether to pull out of a landmark international accord to fight climate change, in a softening of his stance toward global warming.
Trump told The New York Times in an interview that he thought there was “some connectivity” between human activity and global warming, despite previously describing climate change as a hoax.
A source on Trump’s transition team told Reuters earlier this month that the New York businessman was seeking quick ways to withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris Agreement to combat climate change.
But asked on Tuesday whether the United States would withdraw from the accord, the Republican said: “I’m looking at it very closely. I have an open mind to it.”
A US withdrawal from the pact, agreed to by almost 200 countries, would set back international efforts to limit rising temperatures that have been linked to the extinctions of animals and plants, heat waves, floods and rising sea levels.
Trump, who takes office on Jan. 20, also said he was thinking about climate change and American competitiveness and “how much it will cost our companies,” he said, according to a tweet by a Times reporter in the interview.
Two people advising Trump’s transition team on energy and environment issues said they were caught off guard by his remarks.
A shift on global warming is the latest sign Trump might be backing away from some of his campaign rhetoric as life in the Oval Office approaches.
Trump has said he might have to build a fence, rather than a wall, in some areas of the US- Mexican border to stop illegal immigration, tweaking one of his signature campaign promises.
Trump, a real estate developer who has never held public office, brushed off fears over conflicts of interest between his job as president and his family’s businesses.
“The law’s totally on my side, the president can’t have a conflict of interest,” he told The New York Times. My company’s so unimportant to me relative to what I’m doing,” Trump said.
Conflict-of-interest rules for executive branch employees do not apply to the president, but Trump will be bound by bribery laws, disclosure requirements and a section of the US Constitution that prohibits elected officials from taking gifts from foreign governments, according to Republican and Democratic ethics lawyers.
“There may be specific laws that don’t apply to the president, but the president is not above the law,” said Richard Painter, a former associate counsel to Republican President George W. Bush.
“Do we really want to run our government where you have the president, the leader of the United States and the free world, saying: ‘I’m going to do the bare minimum to squeak by?’” asked Nor- man Eisen, a former top ethics lawyer in Obama’s White House.
Trump’s businesswoman daughter Ivanka joined her father’s telephone call with Argentine President Mauricio Macri earlier this month and attended a meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, raising questions of possible conflicts of interest.
When asked whether House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan and other Republicans in Congress would consider his trillion-dollar infrastructure plan, Trump boasted he was popular with the party’s leaders on Capitol Hill.