Donald Trump has never been closer to returning to the White House than he is at this moment. Despite becoming
a convicted felon in early June, Trump was polling on par with President Biden at the start of the summer — and that was before Biden’s disastrous debate performance. Now, Dems really do seem to be in disarray over the best course of action going into the critical final months before the November election.
What voters ultimately decide will have significant ramifications for Biden’s climate legacy — namely, the fate of the
Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark bill enacted in 2022. In the years since the IRA’s passage, Republicans have become savvier in their attacks on climate change, honing their rhetoric and misinformation about EVs, the energy transition, and climate science more broadly. The Heritage Foundation even published an extensive playbook on how, exactly, Trump should dismantle the progress made in the green transition.
The stakes are consequential, to say the least: One recent estimate by
CarbonBrief found that a Trump reelection would add an extra 4 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent to the atmosphere by 2030 compared to a Biden reelection. That is enough to “negate — twice over — all of the savings from deploying wind, solar, and other clean technologies around the world over the past five years,” the report said.
With the climate agenda on the line, Heatmap is keeping a running list of Trump’s climate-related statements on the campaign trail. We’ve looked at his rallies, TV appearances, social media comments, and debate quotes and compiled a list of his most frequent and blatantly
inaccurate claims since he vacated the White House in January 2021. While some of his musings (okay, fine, a lot of them) might be laughably absurd, others might be something you’ve wondered about yourself. To help you better separate fact from fiction, we’ve added context and explanation to each quote, along with a bottom-line determination of the remark’s facticity.
This list is a work in progress and will be regularly updated in the coming months. If you’re looking for just the newest stuff, you can find that
here, here, and here. For ease of navigation, you can find what you’re looking for by using the new pages below:
Climate and Weather | The Paris Agreement | Wind and solar | Electric Vehicles | Oil and Gas | Efficiency, etc.
This article was originally published on January 15, 2024. It was last updated on July 1, 2024 at 4:45pm ET.
