Media reports suggesting that President-elect Donald Trump has evolved on global warming are absolute nonsense, according to Trump’s incoming chief-of-staff.
“He’ll have an open mind about it but he has his default position, which most of it is a bunch of bunk,” Reince Priebus, the incoming chief-of-staff, said on Fox News Sunday. “But he’ll have an open mind and listen to people.”
President-elect Trump told New York Times reporters Nov. 23 that he would keep an “open mind” on global warming. The NYT and other media outlets took Trump’s comments to indicate continued government support of the climate change lobby.
“On climate change, Mr. Trump refused to repeat his promise to abandon the international climate accord reached last year in Paris, saying, ‘I’m looking at it very closely,’” NYT reported in a summary of its interview with the president-elect.
“Despite the recent appointment to his transition team of a fierce critic of the Paris accords, Mr. Trump said that ‘I have an open mind to it’ and that clean air and ‘crystal clear water’ were vitally important,” the Times wrote.
Priebus, the Chairman of the Republican National Committee, is likely reiterating many of the previously unreported comments Trump made during the interviews.
Trump, for instance, did tell the reporters that he’d keep an “open mind” on the Paris climate agreement, but also maintained that he is deeply skeptical about so-called man-made global warming.
Trump also listed a number of prominent climate skeptics, and took NYT publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. to task for trying to link global warming to storms.
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