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Politics

We Fact Checked Everything Trump Has Said About Climate Change Since 2021

Not all of it is wrong!

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

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.

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Adaptation

The ‘Buffer’ That Can Protect a Town from Wildfires

Paradise, California, is snatching up high-risk properties to create a defensive perimeter and prevent the town from burning again.

Homes as a wildfire buffer.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The 2018 Camp Fire was the deadliest wildfire in California’s history, wiping out 90% of the structures in the mountain town of Paradise and killing at least 85 people in a matter of hours. Investigations afterward found that Paradise’s town planners had ignored warnings of the fire risk to its residents and forgone common-sense preparations that would have saved lives. In the years since, the Camp Fire has consequently become a cautionary tale for similar communities in high-risk wildfire areas — places like Chinese Camp, a small historic landmark in the Sierra Nevada foothills that dramatically burned to the ground last week as part of the nearly 14,000-acre TCU September Lightning Complex.

More recently, Paradise has also become a model for how a town can rebuild wisely after a wildfire. At least some of that is due to the work of Dan Efseaff, the director of the Paradise Recreation and Park District, who has launched a program to identify and acquire some of the highest-risk, hardest-to-access properties in the Camp Fire burn scar. Though he has a limited total operating budget of around $5.5 million and relies heavily on the charity of local property owners (he’s currently in the process of applying for a $15 million grant with a $5 million match for the program) Efseaff has nevertheless managed to build the beginning of a defensible buffer of managed parkland around Paradise that could potentially buy the town time in the case of a future wildfire.

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How the Tax Bill Is Empowering Anti-Renewables Activists

A war of attrition is now turning in opponents’ favor.

Massachusetts and solar panels.
Heatmap Illustration/Library of Congress, Getty Images

A solar developer’s defeat in Massachusetts last week reveals just how much stronger project opponents are on the battlefield after the de facto repeal of the Inflation Reduction Act.

Last week, solar developer PureSky pulled five projects under development around the western Massachusetts town of Shutesbury. PureSky’s facilities had been in the works for years and would together represent what the developer has claimed would be one of the state’s largest solar projects thus far. In a statement, the company laid blame on “broader policy and regulatory headwinds,” including the state’s existing renewables incentives not keeping pace with rising costs and “federal policy updates,” which PureSky said were “making it harder to finance projects like those proposed near Shutesbury.”

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Hotspots

The Midwest Is Becoming Even Tougher for Solar Projects

And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewables.

The United States.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

1. Wells County, Indiana – One of the nation’s most at-risk solar projects may now be prompting a full on moratorium.

  • Late last week, this county was teed up to potentially advance a new restrictive solar ordinance that would’ve cut off zoning access for large-scale facilities. That’s obviously bad for developers. But it would’ve still allowed solar facilities up to 50 acres and grandfathered in projects that had previously signed agreements with local officials.
  • However, solar opponents swamped the county Area Planning Commission meeting to decide on the ordinance, turning it into an over four-hour display in which many requested in public comments to outright ban solar projects entirely without a grandfathering clause.
  • It’s clear part of the opposition is inflamed over the EDF Paddlefish Solar project, which we ranked last year as one of the nation’s top imperiled renewables facilities in progress. The project has already resulted in a moratorium in another county, Huntington.
  • Although the Paddlefish project is not unique in its risks, it is what we view as a bellwether for the future of solar development in farming communities, as the Fort Wayne-adjacent county is a picturesque display of many areas across the United States. Pro-renewables advocates have sought to tamp down opposition with tactics such as a direct text messaging campaign, which I previously scooped last week.
  • Yet despite the counter-communications, momentum is heading in the other direction. At the meeting, officials ultimately decided to punt a decision to next month so they could edit their draft ordinance to assuage aggrieved residents.
  • Also worth noting: anyone could see from Heatmap Pro data that this county would be an incredibly difficult fight for a solar developer. Despite a slim majority of local support for renewable energy, the county has a nearly 100% opposition risk rating, due in no small part to its large agricultural workforce and MAGA leanings.

2. Clark County, Ohio – Another Ohio county has significantly restricted renewable energy development, this time with big political implications.

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