From ‘global cooling’ to ‘beautiful coal’: Trump’s startling climate claims of 2025 | Trump administration
1. Putting people before fish
Upon his return to the White House in January, Trump revealed that an unusual fixation would become an immediate priority for his administration: the plight of an endangered three-inch-long fish that lives in California.
The unassuming Delta smelt, Trump said uncharitably, is “an essentially worthless fish” that was lavished with flows of water that should instead go to neighboring farmers or help fight the devastating wildfires raging hundreds of miles south of Los Angeles.
On his first day in office, Trump issued an eye-catching executive order titled “Putting People Before Fish” that required water to be diverted from smelt habitat to people in need.
Experts were quick to point out that water located so far away would not aid firefighting efforts in Los Angeles, with the small amount of water provided to keep the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta ecosystem intact dwarfed by the much larger forces at play in California, such as the climate crisis, which has caused monumental droughts in the region.
2. Wind power ‘drives whales crazy’
Continuing the aquatic theme, Trump’s first month in the most powerful office on the planet also included a bizarre tirade against offshore wind power for its supposed impact on whales.
The president said “windmills” were “dangerous,” citing the example of whales washed up on the coast of Massachusetts as proof that “windmills drive whales crazy, obviously.”
As a wave of dead and sick whales washed up on shores, scientists in Trump’s federal government rejected the idea that wind turbines placed in the ocean were to blame.
“At this point, there is no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization studies could potentially cause whale deaths,” says the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration. “There is no known link between the deaths of large whales and ongoing offshore wind activities.”
The main threats to whales remain entanglement in fishing nets, collisions with boats and changing prey behavior due to the rapid warming of the ocean due to the climate crisis, forcing whales closer to land, experts say.
That didn’t deter Trump from expressing a long-standing grudge against wind power by halting planned projects and declaring, “we don’t allow wind turbines and we don’t want solar panels” in August. The president also claimed that wind is “the most expensive energy there is” – a false claim: wind and solar are, in fact, among the cheapest energy sources that have ever existed.
3. Clean and beautiful coal
In September, Trump delivered a remarkable, often fact-free speech to the United Nations in which he declared that climate change is “the greatest scam ever perpetrated in the world,” accusing “stupid people” of being responsible for predictions that have hobbled countries with a costly “green scam.”
But perhaps the most unusual revelation of the speech came from Trump, who explained how he had sought to directly rebrand coal as a clean energy source. “I have a little settlement at the White House,” he said. “Never use the word ‘coal’. Only use the words ‘clean, beautiful coal’. That sounds much better, doesn’t it?”
In fact, coal is far from clean. It is the dirtiest of all fossil fuels in terms of the carbon it emits when burned, which then warms the planet, and it also releases air pollutants that regularly harm the heart and lung health of those who live near coal-fired power plants.
Black lung disease, meanwhile, is an affliction that many coal miners have suffered from directly inhaling coal dust (the Trump administration eliminated a program to screen coal miners for respiratory problems).
The federal government, through various administrations, has dedicated funds to projects to install carbon capture facilities at coal-fired power plants, to prevent harmful emissions from escaping, but this has not yet been implemented in any significant way in the United States.
4. Global cooling
In the same speech to embattled-looking diplomats at the UN, Trump mocked the scientific reality of global warming, saying instead that scientists had just changed their minds as the planet cooled.
“Before, it was global cooling,” he said. “If you look back, in the 1920s and 1930s, they said global warming would kill the world. We have to do something. Then they said global warming would kill the world. But then it started getting colder.”
The world is not getting colder – it is warming at the fastest rate in human history, due to the burning of fossil fuels and, to a lesser extent, deforestation. Scientists are unequivocal about this, as is anyone who can understand a simple temperature graph.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the field of climate science was not as developed as it is today, but even then the greenhouse effect was understood and few scientists in the decades that followed expressed concerns about “global cooling” compared to those who warned of global warming.
The Earth is thought to have been subject to long, gentle cooling for thousands of years due to natural forces, but this was upended by the Industrial Revolution, with the large quantities of heat-trapping gases emitted over the last 150 years setting us on a completely new and dangerous path. The world is warmer today than at any other time in human civilization.
5. Climate change surveys
Last month, Trump announced new investigations related to the climate crisis. Not to learn more about the severity of global warming and its implications as such, but rather to target those who have been telling the world about it.
“This is a small conspiracy,” the president said at a U.S.-Saudi investment forum in Washington. “We need to investigate them immediately. They’re probably under investigation.”
It’s not clear who “they” are: the scientists, the Democratic politicians, the insurance companies pulling out of states because of the crushing cost of climate-induced disasters? – but Trump continued.
“Their policies punish success, reward failure and produce disaster, including the worst inflation in our nation’s history,” he said.
While the Trump administration has fired scientists, removed mentions of the climate crisis from government websites, and banned federal employees from uttering verboten words like “emissions” and “green,” the reality remains that the world is warming and past projections about it have been generally accurate.
Some of the most accurate predictions of global warming have come from the fossil fuel industry, which knew of the dangers as early as the 1950s and produced surprisingly accurate projections of future heat in the 1970s.
However, instead of informing the world of this peril, oil and gas companies have launched a decades-long campaign to downplay and distort this science in order to maintain their lofty position in the global economy.
Trump did not call for an investigation into these companies, choosing instead to openly solicit donations from them in exchange for rolling back clean air protections once he became president — a promise he largely kept.
