In the final throes of the presidential campaign, Donald Trump is trying to cast himself as a protector of mother nature, even as he calls climate change a hoax.
“I’m an environmentalist,” he said this month in Wisconsin. “I want clean air and clean water. Really clean water. Really clean air.”
This past weekend, he falsely boasted about the quality of the environment when he was president.
“We had the cleanest air for four years of any country by far,” he said on Saturday in Novi, Mich. “The cleanest water. That’s what I want. I want clean air, clean water, and jobs.”
But as Trump talks of clean air and water, he regularly disputes basic facts underpinning contemporary climate science. His approach to the environment, which has been adopted across much of the Republican Party, would roll back regulations, expand oil and gas production and curtail the federal government’s regulatory powers.
As Lisa Friedman reports today, the Environmental Protection Agency would be a particular focus of a new Trump administration, which would “tear down and rebuild” the structure of the agency, said Mandy Gunasekara, a leading candidate to run the agency if Trump is elected.
These moves would come at a time when the consequences of man-made climate change are mounting. Last year was the hottest in recorded history by a wide margin. This year there have been 24 natural disasters that have inflicted at least $1 billion in damage in the United States, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Trump’s vows to at once allow more drilling for oil and gas, deliver clean water and air ignore decades of climate science, experts say.
“He promises people things that are impossible based on the other promises that he made,” said Ben Jealous, executive director of the Sierra Club. “To say that you’re going to increase fossil fuel production and then to turn around and promise people clean air and clean water is clueless.”
Throughout his campaign, Trump has courted the oil and gas industry, at one point encouraging energy executives to donate $1 billion to his presidential campaign while promising to roll back regulations. At campaign rallies, he regularly says he will embrace the mantra of “drill, baby, drill,” if returned to office.
What the science says
But scientists have long understood that the burning of oil and gas are the main drivers of global warming, which has led to worldwide temperatures over the past year to be more than 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than before the Industrial Revolution.
In recent months, Trump has mostly avoided directly talking about man-made global warming, reverting to his boasts on clean air and clean water.
“During our four years, we had the cleanest air and the cleanest water,” Trump said during an interview with the podcast host Joe Rogan last week.
That statement is not accurate. As president, Trump rolled back reams of environmental regulations, leading to increases in harmful emissions from power plants and factories, and an uptick in pollutants flowing into public waterways.
Karoline Leavitt, a Trump campaign spokeswoman, said in a statement that, during his term, “President Trump advanced conservation and environmental stewardship while promoting economic growth for families across the country.” Leavitt called Kamala Harris’s energy policies “radical” and said they would “hurt American workers, help China and do virtually nothing to help the environment.”
“Just because he’s talking about air and water pollution, no one should be fooled,” said Gina McCarthy, an administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama. “He would dismantle all those rules, all those regulations, and the E.P.A. itself if he’s elected again.”
McCarthy noted that beyond contributing to climate change, the burning of coal, oil and gas is also a main driver of air pollution and water pollution.
“Both of those things are going to be impacted by fossil fuels,” she said. “Most of the damage to our environment has come from our dependence on fossil fuels.”
Last year at the United Nations climate summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, leaders from around the globe pledged to phase out fossil fuels. Doing so will take decades and require trillions of dollars in investments, yet some countries are already making rapid progress. Scientists and policymakers say that a world powered by renewable energy will be much cleaner than one powered by coal, oil and gas.
“The United States right now needs to be focused on leading the world away from fossil fuels in the interest of stabilizing our planet,” Jealous said. “When you look at a lake that’s contaminated with mercury, it’s often because of a coal-fired power plant that’s upwind from it.”
The Republican approach
Mr. Trump’s message has caught on with other prominent Republicans.
“A lot of people are justifiably worried about all these crazy weather patterns,” Trump’s running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, said this month. “I think it’s important for us, first of all, to say, Donald Trump and I support clean air, clean water. We want the environment to be cleaner and safer.”
Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and the architect of the Project 2025 plan, last month said in an interview with the Times that “the United States has some of the cleanest air and water among the developed world.”
Project 2025 calls for rolling back environmental regulations, repealing federal incentives designed to promote clean energy, opening up more federal lands to drilling, and replacing career scientists inside the E.P.A. with political appointees.
Roberts did not reply to a request for comment.
Trump’s message on clean air and clean water may resonate with many voters. A strong majority of Americans support the Clean Water Act, according to a survey by the Walton Foundation and Morning Consult.
At the same time, just 37 percent of voters say that dealing with global warming is very important to them, according to a survey from Yale University.
“You haven’t heard the word environment in seven months,” Trump said in September in Las Vegas. “You know why? It doesn’t play. It doesn’t play. We want clean air. We want crystal-clear water, beautiful water.”
Turning back the clock
Trump’s talking points on the quality of air and water hark back to the legacy of American conservationism and the dawn of the modern environmental movement, including Richard Nixon’s establishment of the E.P.A. in 1970.
That was a moment when the effects of heavy industry and widespread pollution were major public health concerns, with smog blanketing American cities and the 1969 fire on Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River, which was saturated with pollutants.
But clean air and clean water are just two measures of environmental health today. As global temperatures keep rising, scientists are also closely tracking how many parts per million of carbon dioxide there are in the atmosphere, and how many additional degrees of warming the world can expect.
“Saying that talking about clean air and clean water is a throwback to the 1970s is an insult to President Nixon and his legacy on the environment,” Jealous said. “Trump did everything he could as president to undermine the purpose of the Environmental Protection Agency, the agency that President Nixon created.”
How Are the World’s Trees Doing? A New Assessment Has Answers.
More than a third of the world’s tree species are threatened with extinction, according to the first comprehensive assessment of trees by the world’s leading scientific authority on the status of species.
The findings, announced on Monday by the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List, are especially sobering given the amount of life that trees sustain. Countless species of other plants, animals and fungi rely on forest ecosystems. Trees are also fundamental to regulating water, nutrients and planet-warming carbon.
The tree assessment is considered comprehensive because it includes more than 80 percent of known tree species. In all, 38 percent were found to be at risk of extinction. More than a thousand experts from around the world contributed. — Catrin Einhorn
More climate news:
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Reuters reports that the world’s pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions still fall far short of what is needed to limit catastrophic global warming, according to the United Nations.
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Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have risen 11.4 percent over the past 20 years, according to the World Meteorological Organization, and greenhouse gas levels broke records last year.
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The Times reports that malaria rates are soaring in Ethiopia, in part driven by climate change.
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The post Trump’s Environmental Claims Ignore Decades of Climate Science appeared first on New York Times.
