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He’s right about one thing: There is indeed a thing called weather.
Long before Donald Trump ever became a politician, he was a climate change denier. “I’m in Los Angeles and it’s freezing,” he tweeted back in 2013. “Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!”
On the 2024 campaign trail, Trump has continued to claim that cold weather is proof that the planet isn’t warming — and that if it is, the consequences won’t be that bad. If only he were correct.
Here’s our fact-check of everything Trump has said about climate and weather since he left office in 2021.
“I want absolutely immaculate clean water and I want absolutely clean air — and we had it. We had H2O, we had the best numbers ever. And we were using all forms of energy, all forms of everything. And yet, during my four years, I had the best environmental numbers ever. My top environmental people gave me that statistic just before I walked on the stage.” [June 27, 2024]
Fact check: Trump likes to claim that he is “the number one” environmentalist president, but it’s hard to conceive of any metric where that could be true.
Historically, Trump has cited as evidence a book written by a longtime Trump Organization staffer that called him “An Environmental Hero,” as well as the fact that “I did the best environmental impact statements.” But Trump’s Project 2025 roadmap for a second term details targeting the waiver that allows California to set more stringent emissions standards for new cars, reducing fuel economy requirements, and making it more difficult to keep big polluters in check.
Trump’s presidential record also speaks for itself: During his four years in office, he rolled back at least 100 environmental rules, including removing pollution controls on streams and wetlands and gutting Obama-era emissions standards. According to one estimate in the British medical journal The Lancet, Trump’s environmental policies resulted in 22,000 deaths in 2019 alone. He’s been described as the worst president for the environment in U.S. history.
During the presidential debate, Trump also referred to a “statistic” from his “top environmental people” that supposedly proved he had the “best environmental numbers ever.” He appeared to be referring to a message from his former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Andrew Wheeler that he posted to Truth Social before the debate, which claims that “CO2 emissions went down” during the Trump administration. This, in turn, appears to be an old talking point of Wheeler’s from 2019 about the Affordable Clean Energy rule, which he claimed would lead to a 34% reduction in CO2 emissions from 2005 in 2030. While that number is nearly correct, most of those reductions would have occurred anyway, without ACE. More accurate calculations for ACE can be found here.
“It’s not certainly great for your clime. Your clime. They call it ‘climate.’” [Jan. 20, 2024]
Fact check: Trump’s mumbling about “clime” at a New Hampshire rally resulted in speculation about his mental well-being — as well as a late-night bit by Stephen Colbert. While it’s unclear exactly what Trump was going on about, we can get a few things straight:
And just for good measure, “weather” differs from “climate” or “clime” in that it refers to short-term meteorological events in a specific place. So while the weather on a given day, week, or month can be unseasonably cold, the overall climate can still be warming.
“You know they don’t call it global warming so much now, they call it climate change because it wasn’t working … Global warming wasn’t working when it was cooling. So now they call it climate change, that takes care of everything.” [Dec. 5, 2023]
Fact check: The term “climate change” was initially popularized by Republicans. In a 2002 memo, Republican pollster Frank Luntz urged President George W. Bush to drop the phrase “global warming” in favor of “climate change” since the former sounds more “frightening” and “has catastrophic communications attached to it,” while “climate change sounds a more controllable and less emotional challenge.”
That said, scientists generally prefer the term “climate change” for pretty much exactly the reason Trump highlighted here — because it encompasses phenomena caused by the increase in CO2 in our atmosphere that don’t manifest as warming, like ocean acidification. For the record: Global warming doesn’t mean that the weather will never get cold, just that it will get less cold on average, over time. In fact, research shows that the cold parts of the globe are warming much, much faster than the rest.
“You can’t miss with climate change. Anything can happen because of climate change. ‘It’s raining like hell!’ Climate change!” [July 13, 2022]
“Most of the country has plenty of water. Rain from heaven. It comes right from heaven. Beautiful rain, you don't know what to do.” [Aug. 17, 2023]
Fact check: That’s … true, actually. “When the atmosphere warms, that means it can hold more water,” Matthew Rodell, the deputy director of Earth sciences for hydrosphere, biosphere, and geophysics at NASA, who has made an extensive study of extreme drought and deluges, told me. That means there will be both more droughts and more rainfall, even though the two phenomena might appear at a glance to contradict each other.
“On the drought side of things, when the air is warmer, more water can evaporate — can be pulled out of the land and out of the plants, into the air, and then transported away,” Rodell explained. “So you have, basically, more water being net removed from an area.” But water in the air has to return to Earth, eventually, in the form of more — and often extreme — rainfall.
Shouldn’t those two extremes effectively balance each other out? As Rodell put it to me, “Floods and droughts are both catastrophes.” During a drought, crops die and wells go dry. And while extreme rainfall might refill an aquifer, “if it’s at the point of being extreme and there’s a flood, that’s not good, either.” Think about Libya, where extended heavy rains in the summer of 2023 broke through dams and inundated towns, killing 4,300 people, displacing an estimated 44,800 more, and causing over $60 million in damage.
One last thing to mention here: While our ability to determine the precise contribution of climate change to individual extreme weather events is improving rapidly, that is, in some ways, beside the point. Rodell explained that “in terms of the frequency, and looking at all these events together and how they’ve changed over time, we’re seeing that they’re increasing in number and severity in correlation with global warming. That doesn’t mean you can say any particular event is 100% by global warming, but, I mean — statistically, it’s extremely unlikely that this is just a coincidence.”
“In my opinion, you have a thing called weather ...” [March 21, 2022]
Fact check: True!
“... It goes up, and it goes down.” [March 21, 2022]
Fact check: While it’s true that the climate has always changed, it hasn’t always changed like this. The rapid rise in both atmospheric carbon dioxide and observed average surface temperature since the Industrial Revolution can only be credited to humans, and specifically to the burning of fossil fuels, which release CO2, a heat-trapping gas. There is now near-universal scientific consensus that the warming we’re witnessing has been caused by human activity.
“The most popular climate myths are the ones that are simple and easy to say,” as John Cook, a senior research fellow at Melbourne University’s School of Psychological Sciences who’s made a specialty of combatting climate disinformation, told me. “It’s the single-cause fallacy, thinking that only one thing can cause natural causes. But you can have other things like human activity that also drive climate change,” Cook added.
Start digging into this kind of logic and it quickly falls apart. For example, Trump’s argument is that the climate has changed naturally in the past; therefore, it must be changing naturally now, as well. But, Cook told me, the same logic could also be used to argue, People have died of cancer in the past; therefore, cigarettes don’t cause cancer now.
“The oceans are gonna rise 1/100th of an inch within the next 300 years. It’s gonna kill everybody. It’s going to create more oceanfront property, that’s what it’s going to do.” [March 12, 2022]
“They said the other day, I heard somebody, that the oceans are going to rise 1/8th of an inch over the next 300 years. We have bigger problems than that. We’ll have a little more beachfront property; that’s not the worst thing in the world.” [July 9, 2022]
Fact check: For starters, Trump’s numbers are orders of magnitude off the mark. The oceans are on track to rise 3.5 feet to 7 feet along America’s coastlines by 2100 — well ahead of Trump’s schedule — according to an independent assessment conducted by federal scientific agencies. Even if global carbon emissions had peaked in 2020 (which we know they did not) and declined relatively rapidly thereafter, the oceans would still probably rise more than 3 feet worldwide by 2300 compared to their 2000 levels, researchers have found, because so much heat is already trapped in the climate system.
According to the latest scientific report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “sea level rise greater than 15 meters,” or 49 feet, by the year 2300 “cannot be ruled out” in a high-emissions scenario.
While unlikely, 49 feet of sea-level rise would be catastrophic. Large swaths of lower Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens would be completely submerged, with waves lapping at the walls of Yankee Stadium and Citi Field. The southern half of Florida would vanish (bye-bye, Mar-a-Lago!). Countries like the Netherlands and Bangladesh would, literally, disappear from the map.
As for that supposedly new oceanfront property Trump is so excited about, scientists expect some 650,000 beachfront properties to flood due to sea level rise in the United States by 2050 — not to mention that globally, some 230 million peoplelive within 3 feet of current high-tide lines.
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And more of the week’s top news about renewable energy conflicts.
1. Nassau County, New York – Opponents of Equinor’s offshore Empire Wind project are now suing to stop construction after the Trump administration quietly lifted its stop-work order.
2. Somerset County, Maryland – A referendum campaign in rural Maryland seeks to restrict solar development on farmland.
3. Tazewell County, Virginia – An Energix solar project is still in the works in this rural county bordering West Virginia, despite a restrictive ordinance.
4. Allan County, Indiana – This county, which includes portions of Fort Wayne, will be holding a hearing next week on changing its current solar zoning rules.
5. Madison County, Indiana – Elsewhere in Indiana, Invenergy has abandoned the Lone Oak solar project amidst fervent opposition and mounting legal hurdles.
6. Adair County, Missouri – This county may soon be home to the largest solar farm in Missouri and is in talks for another project, despite having a high opposition intensity index in the Heatmap Pro database.
7. Newtown County, Arkansas – A fifth county in Arkansas has now banned wind projects.
8. Oklahoma County, Oklahoma – A data center fight is gaining steam as activists on the ground push to block the center on grounds it would result in new renewable energy projects.
9. Bell County, Texas – Fox News is back in our newsletter, this time for platforming the campaign against solar on land suitable for agriculture.
10. Monterey County, California – The Moss Landing battery fire story continues to develop, as PG&E struggles to restart the remaining battery storage facility remaining on site.
A conversation with Biao Gong of Morningstar
This week’s conversation is with Biao Gong, an analyst with Morningstar who this week published an analysis looking at the credit risks associated with offshore wind projects. Obviously I wanted to talk to him about the situation in the U.S., whether it’s still a place investors consider open for business, and if our country’s actions impact the behavior of others.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
What led you to write this analysis?
What prompted me was our experience in assigning [private] ratings to offshore wind projects in Europe and wanted to figure out what was different [for rating] with onshore and offshore wind. It was the result of our recent work, which is private, but we’ve seen the trend – a lot of the big players in the offshore wind space are kind of trying to partner up with private equity firms to sell their interests, their operating offshore wind assets. But to raise that they’ll need credit ratings and we’ve seen those transactions. This is a growing area in Europe, because Europe has to rely on offshore wind to achieve its climate goals and secure their energy independence.
The report goes through risks in many ways, including challenging conditions for construction. Tell me about the challenges that offshore wind faces specifically as an investment risk.
The principle behind offshore wind is so different than onshore wind. You’re converting wind energy to electricity but obviously there are a bunch of areas where we believe it is riskier. That doesn’t mean you can’t fund those projects but you need additional mitigants.
This includes construction risk. It can take three to five years to complete an offshore wind project. The marine condition, the climate condition, you can’t do that [work] throughout the year and you need specialized vehicles, helicopters, crews that are so labor intensive. That’s versus onshore, which is pre-fabricated where you have a foundation and assemble it. Once you have an idea of the geotechnical conditions, the risk is just less.
There’s also the permitting process, which can be very challenging. How do you not interrupt the marine ecosystem? That’s something the regulators pay attention to. It’s definitely more than an onshore project, which means you need other mitigants for the lender to feel comfortable.
With respect to the permitting risk, how much of that is the risk of opposition from vacation towns, environmentalists, fisheries?
To be honest, we usually come in after all the critical permitting is in place, before money is given by a lender, but I also think that on the government’s side, in Europe at least, they probably have to encourage the development. And to put out an auction for an area you can build an offshore wind project, they must’ve gone through their own assessment, right? They can’t put out something that they also think may hurt an ecosystem, but that’s my speculation.
A country that did examine the impacts and offer lots of ocean floor for offshore is the U.S. What’s your take on offshore wind development in our country?
Once again, because we’re a rating agency, we don’t have much insight into early stage projects. But with that, our view is pretty gloomy. It’s like, if you haven’t started a project in the U.S., no one is going to buy it. There’s a bunch of projects already under construction, and there was the Empire Wind stop order that was lifted. I think that’s positive, but only to a degree, right? It just means this project under construction can probably go ahead. Those things will go ahead and have really strong developers with strong balance sheets. But they’re going to face additional headwinds, too, because of tariffs – that’s a different story.
We don’t see anything else going ahead.
Does the U.S. behaving this way impact the view you have for offshore wind in other countries, or is this an isolated thing?
It’s very isolated. Europe is just going full-steam ahead because the advantage here is you can build a wind farm that provides 2 or 3 gigawatts – that’s just massive. China, too. The U.S. is very different – and not just offshore. The entire renewables sector. We could revisit the U.S. four or five years from today, but [the U.S.] is going to be pretty difficult for the renewables sector.
What I’m hearing from developers and CEOs about the renewable energy industry after the Inflation Reduction Act
As the Senate deliberates gutting the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean electricity tax credits, renewable energy developers and industry insiders are split about how bad things might get for the sector. But the consensus is that things will undoubtedly get worse.
Almost everyone I talked to insisted that solar and wind projects further along in construction would be insulated from an IRA repeal. Some even argued that spiking energy demand and other macro tailwinds might buffer the wind and solar industries from the demolition of the law.
But between the lines, and beneath the talking points and hopium, executives are fretting that lots of future investments are in jeopardy. And the most pessimistic take: almost all projects will have their balance sheets and time-tables impacted in some way that’ll at minimum increase their budget costs.
“It’s hard to imagine, if the legislation passes in its current form, that it wouldn’t impact all projects,” said Rob Collier, CEO of renewable energy transaction platform LevelTen.
Even industry analysts with the gloomiest views of the repeal say there’s plenty of projects that will keep chugging along and might even become more valuable to investors if they’re close enough to construction or operation. This aligns with recent analysis from BloombergNEF, which found the House bill would diminish our nation’s renewables build-out – but not entirely end its pace.
“The more useful way to break down which project may be hit the hardest is where the projects are going to fall in their development life-cycle,” Collier said. “Projects that have either started construction or have the ability to start construction … are going to very likely rise in terms of their appeal and attractiveness and those projects will be at a premium, if they’re able to skate through the legislative risk and qualify for tax credits.”
There is a more optimistic industry view that believes increased project costs will just be passed along to consumers via higher electricity prices. The American people will in essence have to pick up the tab where the federal tax code left it. Optimists also cite the increased use of power purchase agreements, or PPAs, between renewables developers and entities who need a lot of electricity, like big tech companies. By signing these PPAs, buyers are subsidizing the construction of projects but also insulating themselves from the risk of rising electricity prices.
The most bullish perspective I heard was from Nick Cohen, the CEO of Doral Renewables, who told me deals like these combined with rising premiums for quick energy on the grid may obviate lost credits in a “zero-incentive environment.”
“It’s not the end of the world,” Cohen told me. “If you’re in construction or you’re going to be in construction very soon, you’re fine.”
But Collier called Cohen’s prediction an “experiment” in customers’ willingness to pay for new energy: “If we’re talking about 40%, 50%, 60% of a project’s capital stack now being at risk because of tax credits, those are pretty large price increases.”
I spoke to multiple companies that have been inking massive deals as this legislation has progressed — although many were not nearly as sanguine about the industry’s future prospects as Doral. Like rPlus Energies, which disclosed last week that it closed a commitment for more than $500 million in tax equity investments for a solar and storage project in Utah. rPlus CEO Luigi Resta told me that the legislation “certainly has posed concern from our investors and from the organization” but the project was so far along that the tax equity investment market wasn’t phased by the bill.
“Many people in my company, myself included, have been doing this for more than 20 years. We’ve seen the starts and stops related to ITC and PTC in solar and wind, in multiple cycles, and this feels like another cycle,” Resta told me. “When the IRA passed, everybody was exuberant. And now the runway looks like it may have a cliff. But for us, our mantra since the beginning of the year has been ‘proceed with caution, preserve and protect.’”
However, crucially, it is important to focus on how that caution looks: Resta told me the company has completely paused new contracting while the company is completing the projects it is currently developing.
One government affairs representative for a large and prominent U.S. renewables developer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve relationships, told me that “whatever rollback occurs will just result in higher electricity prices over time.” In the near term, the only language that would truly gut projects in progress today would be “foreign entity of concern” restrictions that would broadly impact any component even remotely connected to Chinese industries. Similar language all but kneecapped the entire IRA electric vehicle consumer credit.
“It included definitions of what it means to be a foreign company that were really vague,” the government affairs representative said. “Anyone who does any business with China essentially can’t benefit from the credit. That was a really challenging outcome from the House that hopefully the Senate is going to fix.” If this definition became law, this source said, it would be the final straw that “freezes investment” in renewable energy projects.
Ultimately, after speaking to CEO after CEO this week, I’ve been left with an impression that business activity in renewables hasn’t really subsided after the House bill passed, and that it’ll be the Senate bill that undoubtedly defines the future of renewable energy for years to come.
Whether that chamber remains the “cooling saucer” it once was will be the decider.