Trump's climate denial is appalling and getting worse
It's a perfect storm of ignorance and malevolence.
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In the wake of Hurricane Helene, Trump’s blatant lies about FEMA using emergency funds for migrants have gotten a lot of attention, and deservedly so: his efforts to whip up a pogrom are a terrifying reminder of his hatefulness right as the presidential campaign hits the home stretch.
But don’t let Trump’s hate distract you from his egregious rejection of science, which as we saw during the covid pandemic can have deadly consequences. With another historic storm, Hurricane Milton, now bearing down on Florida, Trump not only still refuses to acknowledge that climate change is happening and creates conditions more favorable to severe storms, but he’s actively lying about it.
“Nobody thought this would be happening, especially now,” Trump said during a photo op in a Helene-impacted part of Georgia on October 1. “It’s so late in the season.” (Watch below.)
Trump used the same talking point during an interview with Laura Ingraham that aired yesterday.
“It’s late in the season, you wouldn’t think a thing like that could happen,” he said.
This is a lie on multiple levels. Worsening hurricanes are not only a predictable consequences of climate change, but we’re actually right in the middle of hurricane season, which runs through late November.
While Trump has changed his position on issues like abortion, he’s consistently been a climate denier. After Hurricane Sandy hit New York City in the fall of 2012, Trump infamously tweeted that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive.” That same day he tweeted that the Obama administration “handled Sandy worse than Katrina.” (Trump is now using this same lie to attack President Biden and Vice President Harris for the Helene response.)
Trump’s decompensation on the campaign trail this year has been undeniable, and his rhetoric about climate has if anything gotten worse.
“Climate change covers everything,” Trump blathered at a Wisconsin campaign stop last Tuesday, while western North Carolina was under water. “It can rain, it can be dry, it can be hot, it can be cold. Climate change. I believe I really am an environmentalist. I’ve gotten environmental awards.” (Watch below.)
It’s true that Trump’s golf course received some sort of award in 2007, but that pales in importance to his terrible environmental record as president.
During his first year in office, Trump rolled back Obama-era flood standards for infrastructure projects, which would’ve required that roads and bridges are designed to cope with rising sea levels and other climate change impacts. Revoking Obama’s executive order before it could take effect, Trump boasted, "We're going to get infrastructure built quickly, inexpensively, relatively speaking, and the permitting process will go very, very quickly."
An NPR report put Trump’s motivation for this move in stark relief (emphasis ours):
Supporters say the Obama flood rules would protect lives, by positioning new roads and buildings on safer ground, and protect financial investments by ensuring that infrastructure projects last as long as they were intended. Some business advocates have objected, saying the new rules would increase the cost of new construction.
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In 2018, Trump rejected the results of a report his own administration produced. It found that if left unchecked climate change would wreck the US economy, costing the nation hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
"I don't believe it,” Trump said, admitting that he’d only read “some” of the study that involved 13 federal agencies and more than 300 climate scientists.
The following year, the Department of Defense released a report stating that “climate-related events” such as recurrent flooding, drought, and wildfires threatened the nation’s military preparedness. But days later, during a major winter storm, Trump tweeted like a fool, “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!”
When wildfires blazed across California in September 2020, Trump blamed forest management and told Wade Crowfoot, California’s natural resources secretary, “It’ll get cooler … you just watch.” (Watch below.)
It’s one thing to be ignorant, another to lie when you should know better. This past summer was the hottest on record. Rising temperatures are resulting in glaciers melting at an unprecedented pace and rising sea levels.
Nonetheless, Trump lied again this week that “the planet has actually gotten little bit cooler recently.”
It’s too generous to characterize Trump as merely uninformed. He’s sneeringly hostile to science and openly mocks any efforts to address the climate crisis.
During June’s presidential debate, President Biden said, “the only existential threat to humanity is climate change.” Trump responded by mocking Biden at a Virginia rally: “I say that the thing that’s an existential threat is not global warming, where the ocean will rise — maybe, it may go down, also — but it may rise one-eighth of an inch in the next 497 years, they say. One-eighth, which gives you a little bit more waterfront property if you’re lucky enough though.”
Trump loves repeating that callous “zinger” about climate change creating more “waterfront property,” as if he’s Lex Luthor from the 1978 Superman movie. During an interview with Elon Musk in August, Trump said, “The biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean is going to rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years, and you’ll have more oceanfront property, right?” Trump then pivoted to fear-mongering about nuclear war — his go-to deflection when asked about climate.
It should go without saying that a presidential candidate “joking” about a serious threat to the world should be disqualifying. But Trump’s climate denial barely registers in the news cycle these days.
A common right-wing argument is that humans should simply suck it up and adapt to climate change. Ben Shapiro once said that even if rising ocean levels flooded coastal communities, people could just sell their homes and move. But the North Carolina floods demonstrate how shortsighted and wrongheaded that thinking is.
As recently as 2021, Asheville was declared a “climate haven” because its climate is cooler than normal for the South, it’s located roughly 300 miles from any coastline, and its more than 2,000 feet above sea level. But none of that mattered when Helene struck. Indeed, scientists have long warned that surging oceans and worsening floods would eventually leave nowhere safe from the ravages of climate change.
Trump’s recklessness goes beyond rhetoric
So much is at stake in the upcoming presidential election, including perhaps our entire representative democracy, but a second Trump presidency would be disastrous for efforts to address the climate crisis.
It’s bad enough that Trump refuses to take a proactive approach to climate change or even acknowledge it exists, but his policies would actually make the government less effective at simply reacting to natural disasters.
Last month, the Biden-Harris administration announced $715 million in new funding for flood damage mitigation. Trump, meanwhile, smears Biden’s green policies as a “scam” and promises to gut the Inflation Reduction Act’s extensive climate initiatives. He’s vowed to pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement again.
Even while out of office, Trump has proven an active threat to the environment. He repeatedly demanded that House Republicans shut down the government if they couldn’t pass a pointless proof of citizenship voting bill. If Trump had his way, the congressional stalemate would’ve paralyzed the government during Helene, and most Republicans voted against funding the government just two days before the storm hit the US.
Originally, the congressional spending resolution included a $10 billion infusion for FEMA — funds desperately needed as the agency confronts a $2 billion budget deficit. MAGA Republicans stripped away those additional funds. The CR that passed only extends FEMA’s current funding through the end of the year. This isn’t “fiscal conservatism.” It’s reckless politics that endangers lives.
As Bill Clinton observed in 2022, MAGA Republicans want Americans miserable and angry so they’ll vote for them, and when they make everything worse, they blame Democrats. It’s MAGA in action, and it’s all Trump offers.
Even during a crisis that requires putting politics aside and working together, Trump gins up hate and tries to divide and conquer. He claimed the Biden-Harris administration was “unresponsive” as Americans impacted by Helene suffered. He said Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp couldn’t get a sleeping Biden on the phone, when Kemp had actually publicly thanked Biden for his swift response. He said Harris was “out campaigning, looking for money,” when she was literally giving an update on the devastation from FEMA headquarters. Even Laura Ingraham ended up fact-checking Trump when he lied about Harris’s Helene response during the interview that aired last night. (Watch below.)
This is all the same, old tired playbook, and we don’t just need to turn the page. We need to slam it shut and hurl it in the fire.
That’s it for today
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Project 2025 would get rid of both fema & noaa. DeSantis refused to talk to Harris. You know he’s going to turn around & blame her for Milton’s devastation.
It also shows what an idiot he is.
he owns a social club on one of Florida’s barrier islands. He should be very familiar with hurricane season.
In fact, he got an insurance payment for damage due to Hurricane Wilma. (Hey, Look at that! End of the alphabet, end of the season.)