President Trump has often doubted the validity of climate change, but his public comments on the topic also haven’t been straightforward, says The New York Times.
In 2009, Trump was one of 50 business leaders who took out a full-page ad in the Times urging “meaningful and effective measures to combat climate change.” But just a few years later, in his 2015 book, “Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again,” he writes: “To begin with, the whole push for renewable energy is being driven by the wrong motivation, the mistaken belief that global climate change is being caused by carbon emissions. If you don’t buy that — and I don’t — then what we have is really just an expensive way of making the tree-huggers feel good about themselves.”
And yet, last year Trump’s organization applied for a permit to build a coastal wall around a golf course in Ireland in order to protect it from “global warming and its effects,” namely rising seas, reported Politico.
Trump has called climate change a hoax multiple times, blaming it on a Chinese strategy to thwart American business. “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive,” said Trump in a 2012 tweet. But when asked about this comment he equivocated.
“On June 28, 2015, he told Jake Tapper of CNN that ‘I’m being sarcastic,’ but then said, ‘It’s a little bit serious.’ He called the comment a joke on ‘Fox and Friends’ on Jan. 18, 2016, adding, ‘But this is done for the benefit of China,’” says the Times.
Likewise, although Trump campaigned on a platform of climate skepticism, in an interview with the Times after his election he said, “I have an open mind to it.”