Warming up to the future president. Former Vice President Al Gore met with Donald Trump and his daughter and transition team member Ivanka on Monday, December 5, to discuss climate change and global warming.
“I had a lengthy and very productive session with the president-elect,” Gore, 68, told reporters, according to The New York Times. “It was a sincere search for areas of common ground. I had a meeting beforehand with Ivanka Trump. The bulk of the time was with the president-elect, Donald Trump. I found it an extremely interesting conversation, and to be continued.”
Gore is one of the nation’s most vocal advocates of climate change. He founded the nonprofit Climate Reality Project, which is devoted to the issue, in 2005, and he starred in An Inconvenient Truth, the 2006 documentary that followed him on his speaking circuit to raise awareness about the Earth’s rising temperatures.
The future president, 70, has been open about his skepticism of climate change. “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive,” he tweeted in 2012. Two years later, he tweeted, “NBC News just called it the great freeze – coldest weather in years. Is our country still spending money on the GLOBAL WARMING HOAX?”
The business mogul seemed to soften his stance during a postelection interview with The New York Times on November 22. He said he now believes there is “some connectivity” between human activities and climate change. “Some, something. It depends how much,” Trump said.
Prior to Trump’s election victory, Gore was critical of the president-elect while campaigning for the businessman’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. He commended Clinton on making the battle against climate change a “top national priority,” while he claimed Trump would “take us toward a climate catastrophe.”
