Selin in CSM on Trump’s Climate Change Policy
Henrik Selin, Director of Curricular Innovation and Initiatives and Associate Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was recently interviewed on what President-Elect Donald Trump’s climate change policy will look like.
Selin was interviewed for a December 17, 2016 article in the Christian Science Monitor entitled “How Will the Trump White House Treat Climate Change? Why It’s So Hard to Know.”
From the text of the article:
“When you have a more seasoned politician coming in, you have a better idea of who his close advisers are,” Henrik Selin, a professor at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, says, comparing Obama and Bush to Trump. “Who his key advisers will be on climate change and what they will tell the president and what the president will act on are all unknowns.”
Mr. Tillerson’s public skepticism about climate change is a lot more nuanced. The chief executive of ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil company, Trump’s pick for secretary of State has acknowledged humans have likely contributed to rising temperatures. He and his company have also voiced support for the Paris climate change agreement. But his solution to the problem has been engineering and risk management, not emissions cuts, according to The Washington Post. He will be at the helm of US effort to implement – or scuttle – the Paris deal. But that, too, could depend on how much influence he actually has over foreign policy decisions, says Dr. Selin at Boston University.
“Will be president Trump actually listen to him or not?” Selin asks rhetorically.
Henrik Selin conducts research and teaches classes on global and regional politics and policy making on environment and sustainable development. His most recent book is EU and Environmental Governance, by Routledge Press, and is also the author of Global Governance of Hazardous Chemicals: Challenges of Multilevel Management by MIT Press. Learn more about him here.