Former Vice President and environmental advocate Al Gore met with Donald Trump and the president-elect's daughter Ivanka Trump today at Trump Tower in Manhattan to talk about climate change during a conversation that Gore told reporters he'd found "extremely interesting."
Trump has not inspired confidence in those concerned about the rapidly warming planet. The Guardianhas reported that the president-elect plans to abandon NASA's climate change research once he's in office, and late last month Trump's Chief of Staff Reince Priebus told Fox News that while Trump will "have an open mind" and listen to peoples' views on the environment, Trump's default position on climate change is still that "most of it is a bunch of bunk." This election year just so happened to be the hottest on record.
Gore's quote after the meeting, from the New York Times:
"I had a lengthy and very productive session with the president-elect. 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, the man whose campaign to inform the world about the realities of climate change was the subject of the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, didn't reveal any more details than that, but said he looked forward to continuing the conversation. The meeting with Trump came just hours before Gore's latest effort to wake people up about climate change, the annual 24 Hours of Reality, a star-studded, 24-hour event that began streaming live today at 6 p.m. EST.
