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Politics

Trump’s False Climate Claims

On water stress, private jets, and the campaign’s home stretch.

Trump’s False Climate Claims
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions:More than 100 people are dead in the Philippines following flooding and landslides caused by Tropical Storm Trami • A low-pressure area in the southwest Caribbean could develop into Hurricane Patty as the storm season enters its final month • New York City’s rainless streak extends Monday as the Yankees-Dodgers World Series heads to the Bronx.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump reups false claims about energy and climate

Former President Donald Trump spent the weekend blasting everything from hydrogen to electric vehicle charging to the Federal Emergency Management Agency while making his final pitch to voters ahead of Election Day. Speaking in a Detroit suburb on Saturday, Trump repeated his common refrain about hydrogen-powered cars, telling supporters, “There will be no hydrogen. They tend to blow up, and once they blow up, you are not recognizable anymore.” Appearing on the Joe Rogan podcast, Trump also alleged that California has “brownouts every weekend” due to the electricity demands of electric vehicles; misleadingly said he’d be able to “instantly” restart construction on a liquefied natural gas facility in Louisiana upon becoming president; and called the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act “so bad” because “we put up billions of dollars for rich companies.” Trump also spoke on Sunday from New York City’s Madison Square Garden alongside Elon Musk, where he incorrectly claimed that FEMA “[hasn’t] even responded in North Carolina.”

hadn’t expected Hurricane Oscar to develop into a hurricane at all, let alone in just 12 hours. But it did. The Category 1 storm made landfall in Cuba on Sunday, hours after passing over the Bahamas, bringing intense rain and strong winds. Up to a foot of rainfall was expected. Oscar struck while Cuba was struggling to recover from a large blackout that has left millions without power for four days. A second system, Tropical Storm Nadine, made landfall in Belize on Saturday with 60 mph winds and then quickly weakened. Both Oscar and Nadine developed in the Atlantic on the same day.

2. Study: Gas stoves shorten lives by an average of 2 years

Pollutants from gas stoves shorten people’s lives by an average of two years, according to a new study by scientists at Jaume I University in Spain. The research, which looked at households in the U.K. and EU, attributed 40,000 deaths per year in Europe to gas stoves, which leak pollutants linked to heart and lung diseases. “Way back in 1978, we first learned that NO2 pollution is many times greater in kitchens using gas than electric cookers,” lead author Juana María Delgado-Saborit told The Guardian. “But only now are we able to put a number on the amount of lives being cut short.”

A separate study in May estimated that 19,000 U.S. adults die annually due to pollution linked to their gas stoves. While awareness of the dangers of gas stoves is still growing, efforts in the U.S. to transition to safer and cleaner cooktops include measures on local ballots as well as the New York Power Authority and NYC Housing Authority’s Induction Stove Challenge. Heatmap exclusively reported on Friday that the judges selected Copper, which will provide 10,000 induction stove units to help transition the city’s public housing away from gas stoves.

3. Nearly two-thirds of the U.S. is currently experiencing drought-related ‘water stress’

Almost two-thirds of the United States is currently experiencing “some level of water stress related to drought,” according to a newly updated Drought Aware map from Esri. Using data from the U.S. Drought Monitor, the USDA, the National Water Model, and other government agencies, the new maps can show users weekly national drought conditions ranging from 2000 to 2024. According to the maps, roughly 4% of the country is currently experiencing “exceptional drought” — which describes “widespread crop/pasture losses” and “shortages of water in reservoirs, streams, and wells [creating] water emergencies” — including parts of Montana, Texas, West Virginia, and Ohio.

Drought mapEsri

4. Citing carbon inequality, new Oxfam report calls for ban on private jets, superyachts

Ahead of COP29, the Britain-based poverty nonprofit Oxfam is encouraging world leaders to “ban or punitively tax carbon-intensive luxury consumption — starting with private jets and superyachts.” The demand accompanies a new Oxfam study linking the emissions from the “luxury toys” of the wealthiest 1% of Europeans to climate impacts that disproportionately affect low- and lower-middle-income nations. “One of the key findings for us is that superyachts are by far the most polluting toy that a billionaire can own, except perhaps for a rocket ship,” one of the authors, Alex Maitland, told The Guardian. According to Oxfam, the average annual carbon footprint of billionaire-owned superyachts is over 6,000 tons — “more than three times the emissions of the billionaires’ private jets,” or the equivalent of 860 years of emissions for the average person in the world.

5. Wildfires, industrial activities drove CO2 level to new record in 2023

Globally averaged surface CO2 reached 420.0 parts per million in 2023, a new record, the World Meteorological Organization reported Monday. WMO’s bulletin, which is published annually, stressed that CO2 had risen 42.9 ppm, or 11.4%, over the past two decades. The 2023 increase was higher than in 2022, which the researchers attributed to fire emissions, reduced plant carbon uptake due to extreme heat stress, and industrial activities. “These are more than just statistics,” WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said in a statement. “Every part per million and every fraction of a degree temperature increase has a real impact on our lives and our planet.”

THE KICKER

The Dutch design studio What If Lab makes tiny homes inside decommissioned wind turbine nacelles. Renew Economy described the abodes, which debuted during Dutch Design Week, as having a “cozy cottage feel” and smart amenities like “a heat pump, solar panels, and a solar water heater.”

Inside a What If Lab dwellingWhat If Lab

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Economy

AM Briefing: Liberation Day

On trade turbulence, special election results, and HHS cuts

Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ Tariffs Loom
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: A rare wildfire alert has been issued for London this week due to strong winds and unseasonably high temperatures • Schools are closed on the Greek islands of Mykonos and Paros after a storm caused intense flooding • Nearly 50 million people in the central U.S. are at risk of tornadoes, hail, and historic levels of rain today as a severe weather system barrels across the country.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Trump to roll out broad new tariffs

President Trump today will outline sweeping new tariffs on foreign imports during a “Liberation Day” speech in the White House Rose Garden scheduled for 4 p.m. EST. Details on the levies remain scarce. Trump has floated the idea that they will be “reciprocal” against countries that impose fees on U.S. goods, though the predominant rumor is that he could impose an across-the-board 20% tariff. The tariffs will be in addition to those already announced on Chinese goods, steel and aluminum, energy imports from Canada, and a 25% fee on imported vehicles, the latter of which comes into effect Thursday. “The tariffs are expected to disrupt the global trade in clean technologies, from electric cars to the materials used to build wind turbines,” explained Josh Gabbatiss at Carbon Brief. “And as clean technology becomes more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., other nations – particularly China – are likely to step up to fill in any gaps.” The trade turbulence will also disrupt the U.S. natural gas market, with domestic supply expected to tighten, and utility prices to rise. This could “accelerate the uptake of coal instead of gas, and result in a swell in U.S. power emissions that could accelerate climate change,” Reutersreported.

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Podcast

The Least-Noticed Climate Scandal of the Trump Administration

Rob and Jesse catch up on the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund with former White House official Kristina Costa.

Lee Zeldin.
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The Inflation Reduction Act dedicated $27 billion to build a new kind of climate institution in America — a network of national green banks that could lend money to companies, states, schools, churches, and housing developers to build more clean energy and deploy more next-generation energy technology around the country.

It was an innovative and untested program. And the Trump administration is desperately trying to block it. Since February, Trump’s criminal justice appointees — led by Ed Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia — have tried to use criminal law to undo the program. After failing to get the FBI and Justice Department to block the flow of funds, Trump officials have successfully gotten the program’s bank partner to freeze relevant money. The new green banks have sued to gain access to the money.

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Funding Cuts Are Killing Small Farmers’ Trust in Climate Policy

That trust was hard won — and it won’t be easily regained.

A barn.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Spring — as even children know — is the season for planting. But across the country, tens of thousands of farmers who bought seeds with the help of Department of Agriculture grants are hesitating over whether or not to put them in the ground. Their contractually owed payments, processed through programs created under the Biden administration, have been put on pause by the Trump administration, leaving the farmers anxious about how to proceed.

Also anxious are staff at the sustainability and conservation-focused nonprofits that provided technical support and enrollment assistance for these grants, many of whom worry that the USDA grant pause could undermine the trust they’ve carefully built with farmers over years of outreach. Though enrollment in the programs was voluntary, the grants were formulated to serve the Biden administration’s Justice40 priority of investing in underserved and minority communities. Those same communities tend to be wary of collaborating with the USDA due to its history of overlooking small and family farms, which make up 90% of the farms in the U.S. and are more likely to be women- or minority-owned, in favor of large operations, as well as its pattern of disproportionately denying loans to Black farmers. The Biden administration had counted on nonprofits to leverage their relationships with farmers in order to bring them onto the projects.

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