Donald Trump Conveniently Rants Most Of His Climate Lies At Once
Or most of them at least. It's missing windmill cancer.
Donald Trump provided an important public service at the Univision town hall in Miami Wednesday, finally collecting most of his favorite lies about climate change into a single rant. He left a few out, as we’ll note, but unlike in his two debate appearances, against Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, this time Trump wasn’t distracted by other lies he was simultaneously trying to push, so it was a much more focused ramble through Trumpian climate disinformation.
Here’s video, courtesy of the KamalaHQ Twitter account:
As with other parts of the Univision town hall, the audience members seem to have come up with tougher questions for Trump than the average network anchor. The question here came from Carlos Aguilera, a public utilities manager, who noted that over 30 years of working in construction, including building water treatment plants in Florida,
“I’ve seen with my own eyes the devastating impacts of climate change, things that include sea level rise, saltwater intrusion in our drinking water supply, frequent flooding of our coastal communities. Given the mounting evidence of climate change, do you still believe it’s a hoax?”
Darn good question, and of course Trump didn’t offer a yes or no answer, but still managed to lie constantly.
At the risk of sanewashing Trump, we’ll break his answer into readable chunks with some fact-checking here and there, although to really appreciate how the man talks, there is some value to considering his rant as a solid block of text, as Sam Stein did on Twitter (also, note that this isn’t even all of it!):
Remember, as an overarching fact-check, that Trump never acknowledges the most basic fact about climate change, which is that burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide, the most abundant greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere. Instead, he always shifts his focus to “clean air and clean water,” which is a dodge: CO2 is invisible, so even emissions that don’t create icky dirty smoke are definitely heating up the planet.
With that in mind, here we go!
TRUMP: Well, let me tell you. First of all, I built Okeechobee Dam and I did so much for Florida in terms of when I was president. And even as a private person I built a lot. But I did the Okeechobee Dam, which solved a big problem from the climate standpoint.
Trump’s talking about the Herbert Hoover Dike at Florida’s Lake Okeechobee, a flood control system mostly built by the Army Corps of Engineers in stages between 1932 and 1964. Trump did authorize improvements to the system during his presidency, but he didn’t “build” the thing. And while preventing flooding is important to mitigate the effects of climate change, it doesn’t do dick for preventing climate change.
TRUMP: What I do think is this, we can’t destroy our country over being forced to do things. They want to do the, I call it the Green New Deal, they call it the Green New Deal, some people call it the Green New Hoax. They want to spend $93 trillion on the climate.
The Green New Deal was never turned into legislation; the “$93 trillion” figure is a bogus number made up based on a rightwing think tank study, and the high price relied on the assumption that it would also include universal single-payer healthcare and universal employment programs. (Don’t get us wrong, that would be terrific!)
Actual estimates for the cost of transitioning to clean energy vary widely, and are often calculated on a global scale, and frontloading the entire price tag as if it were going to be paid tomorrow also ignores that the costs would be spread out through 2050, the target for reaching net zero emissions.
For the USA, a 2019 estimate put the cost of transitioning to clean energy here at $4 trillion if we keep existing nuclear plants online, but again, that leaves out a number of factors, like all the savings from eliminating fossil fuel infrastructure. We went into that a bit here. And most of the highest, eye-popping numbers leave out the comparative cost of worsening climate disasters, the savings from reducing health problems, the lower cost and greater efficiency of clean electricity compared to fossil fuels, and of course the benefits of increased economic growth in new energy.
OK, that’s our longest digression, now we’ll mostly point out short lies!
TRUMP: Now, I happen to think that there are very important elements of climate, water, and air. In my administration. I had the cleanest air on record, and yet I didn’t destroy jobs. [Five lines of rambling snipped]
Yep, water and air again. Those ain’t climate, Sally.
TRUMP: At the same time, you can’t give up your country. You can’t say that we’re not going to have any jobs anymore. [Three lines of already-debunked “$93 trillion” lies snipped.]
Remember, more like $4 trillion, and the benefits more than pay for it.
So I always feel that with the climate, and I have been an environmentalist. I built many things. I own Doral right next door, and we did that in a very environment… I get awards, environmental awards for the way I built it, for the water, the way I use the water, the sand, the mixing of the sand and the water. I mean many different — (trails off) [three lines snipped]
As Rolling Stone notes, “Trump has never produced the names of these alleged awards, and a 2017 investigation by The Washington Post could not find evidence that they exist.”
OK, home stretch time! Here we will summarize heavily to save space: Trump claimed that “we’re competing against countries that don’t spend anything on climate change like China and others,” which as we’ve noted is decades out of date. China is still the world’s biggest source of CO2 emissions, but the simple fact is that China’s energy transition is beating the rest of the world combined.
Trump then dredged up a couple of his other favorite lies, like the claim that sea level rise will only be “an eighth of an inch, over 300 years,” which is bullshit; sea level rise is happening at a much faster rate. Just in Florida, water levels have increased eight inches since 1950, and the rate of sea level rise, combined with land subsidence, is only accelerating.
Trump once again claimed that “The real global warming that we have to worry about is nuclear,” because he is an idiot. (Heck, by wiping out much of humanity and civilization, nuclear war would end most greenhouse emissions, to say nothing of “nuclear winter.” Not that it’s a good idea.)
We should also note that Trump’s rant left out a few of his biggest lies, like “windmills cause cancer,” “windmills kill all the birds.” Nope, that’s domestic cats, collisions with buildings, and habitat loss from development and climate change, in no particular order. Somehow, he didn’t fret about sharks and batteries, either. The end, goddamn it.
[Joe. My. God. / Univision town hall transcript / Politico / Politico / Environment 360 / Inside Climate News / Rolling Stone /
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Trump is basically an advocate for ignorance. The less you know, the more you like him.
>> TRUMP: At the same time, you can’t give up your country. You can’t say that we’re not going to have any jobs anymore. [Three lines of already-debunked “$93 trillion” lies snipped.]<<
Part of my jerb is to write grants for various infrastructure projects that involve environmental mitigation and EVERY SINGLE LAST ONE OF THESE has a specific section dedicated to "Is this project going to create jobs?" So yea, asshole, there will be jobs created because it's a FUCKING REQUIREMENT.
>>Trump then dredged up a couple of his other favorite lies, like the claim that sea level rise will only be “an eighth of an inch, over 300 years,” which is bullshit; sea level rise is happening at a much faster rate.<<
Here in Louisiana, we are losing the equivalent of a football field of land every 100 minutes due to sea level rise. Without action, experts (i.e., not that asshole) are predicting that we could lose up to another 3000 SQUARE MILES over the next 50 years.
Tl;dr: PAB is a fucking goddamn idiot. But y'all already knew that.