Donald Trump came to lunch at The New York Times. Let me offer a few impressions of my first close encounter with him since he declared for the presidency.
The most important was that on several key issues – like climate change and torture – where he adopted extreme positions during his campaign to galvanize his base, he went out of his way to make clear he was rethinking them. How far? I don’t know. But stay tuned, especially on climate.
There are many decisions that President-elect Trump can and will make during the next four years. Many of them could be reversible by his successor. But there is one decision he can make that could have truly irreversible implications, and that is to abandon America’s commitment to phasing out coal, phasing in more clean energy systems and leading the world to curb carbon-dioxide emissions before they reach a level that produces a cycle of wildly unpredictable climate disruptions.
When asked where he stood on that climate change issue – which in the past he dismissed as a hoax – and last December’s U.S.-led Paris emissions-reduction accord, the president-elect did not hesitate for a second: “I’m looking at it very closely. I have an open mind to it. We’re going to look very carefully. You can make lots of cases for different views. I will tell you this: Clean air is vitally important. Clean water, crystal-clean water is vitally important.”
Do you think climate change is caused by human activity?