Trump’s Climate Policies Are Based On Conspiracy Theories And Big Oil Interests

Washington, D.C. – President Trump will take the stage this evening to accept his party’s nomination for the presidency. If his speech tonight tracks with recent remarks, he’ll likely heavily focus on the Green New Deal, Joe Biden’s clean energy plan, and hamburgers.

Now, we know Trump has referred to himself as a “very stable genius,” but the truth is Trump is a self-interested conspiracy theorist who believes windmills cause cancer.  

Ahead of tonight’s speech, here is a roundup of the craziest things the president has ever said on climate, clean energy, and the Green New Deal — and where he found is always inaccurate information.

He listens to tweets from science deniers instead of actual scientists.

• Trump spends way too much time on Twitter, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that his talking point about the cost of the Green New Deal actually began as wild speculation in a Twitter thread.

• One of Trump’s favorite fear-mongering falsehoods is that the Green New Deal would cost $100 trillion.

• This inflated price tag comes from a tweet by The Manhattan Institute’s Brian Riedl, who admitted in the same thread he couldn’t calculate the actual number. The Manhattan Institute has taken $4,557,917 from fossil fuel interests.

• Politico called the $93 trillion price tag “bogus,” arguing the think tank’s analysis “made huge assumptions” about the implementation of the plan and failed to distinguish between government and private-sector spending. 

He pretends to care about Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities only when it serves the fossil fuel industry’s interests. 

• In a press briefing last year, Trump said the Green New Deal would “crush the dreams of the poorest Americans, and disproportionately harm minority communities.”

• This comment seems straight out of Chevron’s playbook, surfacing mere months after they started their disinformation campaign attempting to show pro-climate policies hurting communities of color. The reality is just the opposite: Our reliance on fossil fuels is killing communities of color and they bear the brunt of the climate crisis.

Planes, trains, and hamburgers.

• Fact-checkers have repeatedly debunked claims that the Green New Deal will ban air travel and cows, but the truth hasn’t stopped Trump’s conservative media hype machine.

• Twitter data from the first day that the Green New Deal was announced (surprise surprise) show the top two performing tweets spreading this misinformation came from pro-Trump TV personalities on OAN and Fox News.

• One of the loudest reporter voices against the Green New Deal has also warned of a plot to force people into dependency on the government through transgender penguins. 

Trump’s climate denial makes him unable to see the massive economic toll of climate change, estimated to be far greater than the COVID-19 economic crash. 

• Two separate reports have warned that the United States could lose as much as 10 percent of GDP annually by the end of the century due to climate change.

• That’s more than twice the impact of the Great Recession of 2007-2009 and three times the long-term projections for the impact of the COVID-19 crisis.

• Still, Trump calls climate change a hoax.

Fear and lies around windmills coincide with an anti-wind push by the fossil fuel industry. 

• Trump has made a litany of bizarre falsehoods about windmills, everything from falsely stating that they cause cancer to claiming that the electricity supply would stop if the wind wasn’t blowing.

• Then there was this gem: “I never understood wind.” &nbsIt has been well-documented that Trump’s long feud with wind energy traces back to his fight to keep wind turbines away from his coastal golf property in Aberdeen.

• Trump’s bizarre (and wildly untrue) talking points against wind energy go back many years, but they also just happened to coincide with a big push against wind energy by fossil-fuel backed special interests.

• One group with deep ties to Charles Koch and Big Oil has been right there all along, promoting the same anti-wind conspiracy theorists that caught Donald Trump’s attention back in 2012.

The reality is wind energy is one of the cheapest sources of electricity and it’s a major job creator, employing 24,000 manufacturing jobs in 500 factories across 42 states.