President-elect Trump on Tuesday said he is keeping an “open mind” about whether he will withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement.
“I’m looking at it very closely. I have an open mind to it,” Trump said in response to a question by New York Times columnist Tom Friedman.
Trump discussed climate change briefly in a meeting with reporters and editors of the New York Times, according to live tweets from reporters attending the meeting.
Times reporter Mike Grynbaum tweeted the Friedman question and Trump’s answer.
Trump on the campaign trail made exiting the 196-nation Paris climate change agreement a top priority for his administration.
The Obama administration’s top climate negotiator, John Pershing, fresh from a meeting in Morocco on implementing the Paris deal, said he was urging the Trump State Department transition team to support the agreement.
“The global community has decided to act, and in that sense, I don’t think it’s helpful for the U.S. to stand aside, I think it’s important to move forward,” Pershing told reporters on a call Tuesday. “They need to move forward,” he added.
“The opportunities are global, and the U.S. is a pretty small share of the market, so if we actually want to play in that space, we’ve got to play globally,” Pershing said. “We’ve got to be an international actor.”
The Obama administration has said that U.S. companies would benefit financially from selling countries their expertise and technologies to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, which many scientists blame for driving manmade climate change. The market for climate change solutions is projected to be several trillion dollars.
