Trump leans into climate denialism
BY: SCOTT WALDMAN | 01/04/2024 06:04 AM EST
The former president is doing little to temper his stance on climate change as he makes a third run for the White House, say experts and supporters.
CLIMATEWIRE | Former President Donald Trump isn’t known for his subtlety, especially when it comes to climate change — which he has dismissed as both a “hoax” and a natural phenomenon that goes “up and down.”
But there have been times over the past eight years in which Trump has stepped softly on the issue.
During his presidency, the Trump team resisted calls to launch an all-out war on climate science, even as he took other steps to undercut it. And in the lead-up to the 2020 election, Trump went more than a year without maligning climate science on Twitter (now known as X) — which was unusual for him.
This time around, however, Trump doesn’t appear to be holding back.
The Republican frontrunner for president is again calling climate change a “hoax” after backpedaling on that language in 2018. He has lied repeatedly about renewable energy, including campaign speeches that blame whale deaths on offshore wind turbines. And he said last month that if elected he would be a “dictator for one day” in part so he could “drill, drill, drill.”
It isn’t just Trump, either. While he was in office, there was some internal conflict over how much his administration should challenge established climate science, which says that humanity’s use of fossil fuels is making the world hotter and more dangerous.
Now, some of his former staffers are building out a comprehensive plan to decimate both climate policy and regulations on fossil fuels. And there are signs that Trump would fill his next administration with officials who are even more hostile to efforts to address global warming.
The change in tone is both notable and dangerous, said Dana Fisher, director of American University’s Center for Environment, Community and Equity.
It shows Trump is no longer making an effort to reach moderate and independent voters and that his approach to climate policy would be even more extreme if he returns to the White House next year.
“He doesn’t feel like he has to temper his language,” Fisher said. “The rhetoric means that he’s much more likely to empower these efforts and initiatives than when he was concerned about how they would play the last time.”
Supporters of the former president have noticed the shift, too.
Trump has learned to ignore the advice of political advisers who told him to soft pedal on climate, said Steve Milloy, a former Trump transition team adviser.
Milloy said Trump surrounded himself in his first term with too many people who were part of Washington’s political class and resistant to dismantling parts of the government.
“A lot of the people he appointed were unfortunately weak,” Milloy said.
‘We are writing a battle plan’
Broadly speaking, Trump’s first term was defined by rolling back and weakening climate policy. He gave energy lobbyists key positions of power, spent four years attempting to dismantle fossil fuel regulations and withdrew the United States from the Paris climate agreement.
Even so, there was some sensitivity to outright climate denialism within his administration.
Trump’s White House blocked a plan to conduct a red team hostile review of the National Climate Assessment, a former adviser told E&E News at the time. A plan to potentially shape the next version by infusing it with scientists who deny the severity of climate change never took off.
In addition, an effort to remake NOAA by installing climate science critics to top positions failed. And partisan climate researchers were fired after they attempted to publish in the government record a series of fliers featuring cherry-picked data and misleading climate claims.
A second Trump administration likely would show less restraint.
Dozens of conservative groups have banded together to write out climate policy goals that would devastate virtually every regulation of the fossil fuel industry. The Project 2025 effort, led by the influential Heritage Foundation and partially authored by a number of former Trump administration officials, also would turn key government agencies, such as EPA, toward increasing fossil fuel production rather than public health protections.
“We are writing a battle plan, and we are marshaling our forces,” Paul Dans, director of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation, told E&E News. “Never before has the whole conservative movement banded together to systematically prepare to take power Day 1 and deconstruct the administrative state.”
At least one former Trump adviser is applauding the new approach.
Trump in his first term was too concerned about what his political advisers were telling him, said Will Happer, Trump’s former National Security Council adviser.
Because of that, he said, Trump dropped a broader restructuring of federal climate science that was in motion. A first step in that direction would have been a review of the National Climate Assessment that would have picked it apart, the emeritus Princeton University physics professor told E&E News.
“He genuinely wanted to do it, but he never did have a staff that he could trust or control,” Happer said in a recent interview. “I certainly saw that firsthand.”
Happer stepped down after the plan was scuttled, but Trump assured him that he was only waiting for the election to be over so that he could pick up the same plan.
“He said, ‘Well, we were going to do this, but it’s dragged on and on, the election is coming, and it’s the wrong time to start it. Let’s do this in my second term,’” Happer recalled Trump telling him.
The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Yet polling suggests Trump’s full-hearted embrace of climate denial might not be a winning issue in the 2024 election.
Almost three-quarters of Americans, or 73 percent, want the government to do more to address climate change, according to a CNN poll released last month. Most want to the government to cut emissions in half by 2030, including 50 percent of Republicans and 95 percent of Democrats, the poll found.
One public policy expert echoed that point.
Since Trump’s first campaign started in 2015, there have been a series of deadly and destructive extreme weather events across the country, making more people aware of the cost of rejecting climate policy, said Andrew Rosenberg, a senior official at NOAA during the Clinton administration.
To run on the rejection of basic science certainly appeals to his base, but it could alienate the independent voters who will decide the election, said Rosenberg, now a senior fellow at the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey School of Public Policy.
“Eight years ago, he might have had a more receptive audience, but I think that’s so much just his base now and his language has gotten so much more extreme, it just sounds bizarre,” Rosenberg said. “He seems even more out of touch to me given what’s happened in the last few years, given where the climate discussion is and where the nation is.”