Mother Nature (WRATH)

[BullNBear52]

On Environment and Energy, Trump Often Picks His Own Facts

By JOHN SCHWARTZ and KITTY BENNETT
AUGUST 3, 2017
President Trump held a rally Thursday night with some of his favorite people: West Virginians. As he often does, he praised coal and coal miners, and claimed credit for a turnaround in the industry.

“We are putting our coal miners back to work,” Mr. Trump said. “We’ve ended the war on beautiful, clean coal. We’ve stopped the E.P.A. intrusion.”

But many of the things Mr. Trump says about coal, climate change and the environment bear a strained relationship with the truth. He often cherry-picks facts that prove to be exaggerations when the broader context is considered. He has made inaccurate assertions many times; he is more likely to repeat than to retract.

Here are five of Mr. Trump’s most prominent climate and environmental claims as president:

He has spurred a coal comeback.

At least 18 mentions since the election.

“And very importantly for Pennsylvania, we have ended the war on beautiful, clean coal, and we are putting our great coal miners back to work.” (April 29)

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Mr. Trump has cast his administration as a savior for the coal industry, and for coal miners in particular.

He has repeatedly taken credit for the opening of a new coal mine in Pennsylvania. But the mine’s owner, Corsa Coal Corporation, announced the project well before the election and had been developing it for some time.

While the number of mining jobs has grown, it’s hardly a boom: Coal mining jobs grew by about 1,100 between December and May.


In fact, the hard times for coal mostly revolve around the economics of the energy industry, including the plunging prices for natural gas brought about by the fracking boom. Cheaper natural gas has made coal less attractive as an energy source.

Mr. Trump enthusiastically supports natural gas fracking, so he is pitting competing interests against each other.

The coal industry is also automating heavily, which means that even an economic recovery for the industry would not result in many new jobs.

And despite the attention from Mr. Trump, the number of jobs in the coal industry is dwarfed by those in solar and wind power.

The Paris agreement was binding.

Mr. Trump made this claim at least three times, and he has criticized the Paris climate deal at least 11 times since the election.

“When we get sued by everybody because we thought it was nonbinding, then you can tell me it was nonbinding.” (June 21)

Mr. Trump campaigned against the Obama administration’s efforts to fight climate change, especially the agreement among nearly 200 nations in Paris to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

As president, Mr. Trump has repeatedly disparaged the Paris deal. On June 1, he announced that the United States would begin the process of abandoning the agreement, saying it bound the nation to conditions that were economically disastrous and that did not restrain other countries.

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At an Iowa rally that month, he again sounded those themes, and scorned the idea that the agreement was voluntary, saying, “Like hell it’s nonbinding!”


The agreement, however, is nonbinding, and was designed from the beginning to be so. The power of the deal flows from the moral duty of nations to meet their commitments and the ability of other nations to shame noncompliant countries into doing their part.

Oddly enough, in announcing that the United States would leave the Paris deal, Mr. Trump called it “the nonbinding Paris accord.”

The Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines will be jobs bonanzas.

At least 26 mentions of the pipelines since the election, half heralding job gains.

“We have finally cleared the way for the construction of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines. Forty-eight thousand new jobs.” (April 29)

While the two pipelines will create a large number of jobs, they won’t last. Keystone would support 42,000 temporary jobs during the two years that it is built, with about 3,900 of those in construction, according to a State Department report from 2014. After that, the pipeline would create just 35 permanent, full-time jobs.

Similarly, the Dakota Access pipeline is expected to support 8,000 to 12,000 temporary jobs and up to 40 permanent jobs, according to the Brookings Institution.

Mr. Trump has also said his approval of the pipelines went through without protest. “I thought I’d take a lot of heat,” he said in June. “I didn’t take any heat. I approved them, and that was it. I figured we’d have all sorts of protests. We didn’t have anything.”

But tens of thousands of people joined the Peoples Climate March in Washington in April, many of them protesting the pipelines and Mr. Trump’s other environmental policies.

Wind turbines are notorious bird killers.

More than 55 mentions since 2012.

“Wind turbines are not only killing millions of birds, they are killing the finances & environment of many countries & communities.” (October 2012)

One of Mr. Trump’s most frequent assertions of the last five years has been that wind turbines — sources of clean, renewable power — are ugly “monstrosities” that kill birds.

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They do kill birds. (And bats, but Mr. Trump does not mention them as often.) By some estimates, as many as 328,000 birds die each year flying into the structures at wind farms.

That sounds like a lot, until you learn that cats kill as many as four billion birds in the continental United States every year.

Buildings, too, kill as many as a billion birds a year, and they aren’t even trying.

Some of Mr. Trump’s animus is personal, or at least financial: For years, he warred with the Scottish government about plans for “a really ugly wind farm” within sight of his golf resort in Aberdeen.

“When I look out onto the ocean from the 18th hole of Trump International Golf Links, to be honest with you, I want to see the ocean. I don’t want to see windmills,” he said in 2006.


His most recent attack on wind came at the June rally in Iowa. “I don’t want to just hope the wind blows to light up your homes and your factory,” he said, referring to the intermittent nature of wind power. (Smart grids and less expensive battery storage can help address that problem.)

“As the birds fall to the ground,” the president added.

He has received ‘many’ environmental awards.

At least 14 mentions since 2011.

“I’ve won many environmental awards, by the way. I’ve actually been called an environmentalist, if you can believe that.”" (Nov. 4)


When Mr. Trump talks tough on climate change, he sometimes offers a kind of credential that he’s an environmentalist who believes in clean air and clean water.

“I’ve won awards on environmental protection,” he said at a business town hall event in April. “I’m a big believer, believe it or not.”

PolitiFact and The Washington Post looked for the awards and came up with just one personal award: local recognition from a Westchester County group for land he donated to New York State as part of a golf course deal that went bad. Which is not none, but also not many, or “many, many.”

These exaggerations have become common refrains for the president, but he appears to have dropped some of his previous assertions since taking office.

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Before and during the presidential campaign, Mr. Trump energetically disputed the existence of global warming, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that the climate is changing and that humans are causing it. He also ridiculed President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who emphasized the need for action.

But as president, Mr. Trump has stopped calling climate change a hoax, at least in public statements.

And he has not revived his allegation that scientists stopped using the term “global warming” and switched to “climate change.” (Both terms are still very much in use.)

Linda Qiu contributed reporting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/climate/trump-climate-fact-check.html?