In the past decade at the forefront of US politics, Donald Trump has unleashed a barrage of unusual, misleading or dubious assertions about the climate crisis, which he most famously called a “hoax”.
This year has seen Trump ratchet up his often questionable claims about the environment and how to deal, if at all, with the threats to it. In a year littered with untruths and wild declarations, these are the five that stood out as the most startling.
• 1. Putting people over fish
Upon re-entering the White House in January, Trump revealed an unusual fixation would become an immediate priority for his administration – the fate of an endangered, three-inch-long fish that lives in California.
The unassuming delta smelt, Trump said rather uncharitably, is “an essentially worthless fish” which had been lavished with water flows that should instead go to nearby farmers or help fight the devastating wildfires that were raging hundreds of miles south in Los Angeles.
On his first day in office, Trump issued an eye-catching executive order titled “Putting people over fish” that demanded water be diverted from the smelt’s habitat and towards needy people.
Experts were quick to point out that water situated so far away would not aid the firefighting effort in LA, with the small amount of water provided to keep the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta ecosystem intact overshadowed by the much larger forces at play in California, such as the climate crisis, which has spurred monumental droughts in the region.
• 2. Wind energy is ‘driving the whales crazy’
Continuing on the aquatic theme, Trump’s first month in the most powerful office on the planet also included a bizarre tirade against offshore wind energy for its supposed impact upon whales.
The president said that “windmills” were “dangerous”, citing the example of whales being washed ashore in Massachusetts as proof that “the windmills are driving the whales crazy, obviously”.
While there were a spate of dead and sick whales becoming stranded ashore, Trump’s own federal government scientists have rejected the idea that wind turbines placed in the ocean are to blame.
“At this point, there is no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys could potentially cause whale deaths,” the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration states. “There are no known links between large whale deaths and ongoing offshore wind activities.”
The main threats to whales continue to be entanglement in fishing nets, boat strikes and altered prey behavior due to a rapidly heating ocean from the climate crisis, which is causing whales to have to forage closer to land, experts say.
This hasn’t deterred Trump from enacting a long-held grudge against wind energy by halting planned projects and stating that “we don’t allow the windmills and we don’t want the solar panels” in August. The president has also claimed that wind is “the most expensive energy there is” – a false claim, wind and solar are, in fact, among the cheapest sources of power that have ever existed.
• 3. Clean, beautiful coal
In September, Trump delivered a remarkable, often fact-free speech to the United Nations, in which he said that climate change is the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”, blaming “stupid people” for predictions that have hobbled countries with a costly “green scam”.
But perhaps the most unusual revelation in the speech was Trump outlining how he has sought to directly rebrand coal as a clean power source. “I have a little standing order in the White House,” he said. “Never use the word ‘coal’. Only use the words ‘clean, beautiful coal’. Sounds much better, doesn’t it?”
Coal is, in fact, far from clean. It is the dirtiest of all fossil fuels in terms of the carbon it emits when burned, which then heats up the planet, and it also gives off air pollutants that routinely harm the heart and lung health of those who live near coal power plants.
Black lung disease, meanwhile, is an affliction many coalminers have suffered after directly inhaling coal dust (the Trump administration axed a program that screened coalminers for the respiratory condition).
The federal government across different administrations has lavished funding upon plans to install carbon capture facilities at coal plants, to stop harmful emissions from escaping, but this has yet to be implemented in any meaningful way in the US.
• 4. Global cooling
In the same speech to beleaguered-looking diplomats at the UN, Trump scoffed at the scientific reality of global heating, instead claiming that scientists had just changed their minds from the planet cooling down.
“It used to be global cooling,” he said. “If you look back years ago in the 1920s and the 1930s, they said, global cooling will kill the world. We have to do something. Then they said global warming will kill the world. But then it started getting cooler.”
The world is not cooling down – it is heating up at the fastest rate in the history of humanity, due to the burning of fossil fuels and, to a lesser extent, deforestation. Scientists are unequivocal about this, as can anyone who can grasp a simple temperature graph.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the field of climate science wasn’t as developed as it is now but even by then there was an understanding of the greenhouse effect and few scientists in the decades since have expressed concerns about “global cooling” compared with those warning of planetary heating.
The Earth is thought to have been in a long, gentle cooling pattern for thousands of years due to natural forces but this was upended by the industrial revolution, with the vast amounts of heat-trapping gases emitted in the past 150 years setting us on a completely new and dangerous path. The world is now hotter than at any previous point in human civilization.
• 5. Climate change investigations
Last month, Trump announced new investigations related to the climate crisis. Not to find more about the severity of global heating and its implications, as such – more to target those who have told the world about it.
“It’s a little conspiracy out there,” the president said at a US-Saudi investment forum in Washington. “We have to investigate them immediately. They probably are being investigated.”
It’s unclear who “they” are – scientists, Democratic politicians, the insurance companies pulling out of states because of the crushing cost of climate-driven disasters? – but Trump pushed on.
“Their policies punish success, rewarded failure and produced disaster, including the worst inflation in our country’s history,” he said.
While the Trump administration has fired scientists, hauled down mentions of the climate crisis from government websites and banned federal employees from uttering verboten words such as “emissions” and “green”, the reality remains that the world is warming up and past projections of this have been generally accurate.
Some of the most accurate forecasts of global heating came from the fossil fuel industry, which knew of the dangers from the 1950s onwards and produced strikingly accurate projections of future heat in the 1970s.
Instead of informing the world of this peril, however, oil and gas companies instead set about a decades-long campaign to downplay and distort this science in order to maintain their lofty position in the global economy.
Trump has not called for an investigation of these companies, choosing instead to openly solicit campaign donations from them in return for rollbacks of clean air protections once he became president – a promise he has largely fulfilled.
