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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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Hotspots

Surprise! A Large Solar Farm Just Got Federal Approval

And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy projects.

The United States.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

1. Lawrence County, Alabama – We now have a rare case of a large solar farm getting federal approval.

  • The Tennessee Valley Authority last week quietly published its record of decision formally approving the 200-megawatt Hillsboro Solar project. The TVA – a quasi-federal independent power agency that delivers electricity across the Southeast – completed the environmental review for the project in June, prior to the federal government’s fresh clampdown on permits for renewables, and declared the project essential to meeting future energy demand.
  • It’s honestly sort of a miracle this was even able to happen. The Trump administration has sought to strongarm the agency into making resource planning decisions in line with the president’s political whims, and has successfully browbeaten the TVA’s board into backing away from certain projects.

2. Virginia Beach, Virginia – It’s time to follow up on the Coastal Virginia offshore wind project.

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Q&A

Permitting on Federal Land Has Long Been a Headache

A conversation with Elizabeth McCarthy of the Breakthrough Institute.

Elizabeth McCarthy.
Heatmap Illustration/The Breakthrough Institute

This week’s conversation is with Elizabeth McCarthy of the Breakthrough Institute. Elizabeth was one of several researchers involved in a comprehensive review of a decade of energy project litigation – between 2013 and 2022 – under the National Environment Policy Act. Notably, the review – which Breakthrough released a few weeks ago – found that a lot of energy projects get tied up in NEPA litigation. While she and her colleagues ultimately found fossil fuels are more vulnerable to this problem than renewables, the entire sector has a common enemy: difficulty of developing on federal lands because of NEPA. So I called her up this week to chat about what this research found.

The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.

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Power lines.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Bureau of Land Management says it will be heavily scrutinizing transmission lines if they are expressly necessary to bring solar or wind energy to the power grid.

Since the beginning of July, I’ve been reporting out how the Trump administration has all but halted progress for solar and wind projects on federal lands through a series of orders issued by the Interior Department. But last week, I explained it was unclear whether transmission lines that connect to renewable energy projects would be subject to the permitting freeze. I also identified a major transmission line in Nevada – the north branch of NV Energy’s Greenlink project – as a crucial test case for the future of transmission siting in federal rights-of-way under Trump. Greenlink would cross a litany of federal solar leases and has been promoted as “essential to helping Nevada achieve its de-carbonization goals and increased renewable portfolio standard.”

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