Throughout this presidential race, Donald Trump has insisted that he cares deeply about the environment. As he put it during an episode of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” last year: “We want to have clean air to breathe, and we want to have beautiful clean water. That’s very important to me.”
What isn’t important to Trump, apparently, is doing anything to combat climate change.
“I’m not a big believer in manmade climate change,” he told a Miami Herald interviewer back in August. “There could be some impact, but I don’t believe it’s devastating…. It goes up, [and] it goes down.”
Trump has said he wants to dismantle the federal Environmental Protection Agency, which has played a pivotal role in President Barack Obama’s attempts to fight global warming. He’s also vowed that, if he wins, he’ll withdraw from the landmark Paris Agreement on climate change. And in 2012, he called climate change a Chinese hoax designed to undercut American manufacturing.
When I asked Jeremy Shakun, a climate scientist at Boston College, about Trump’s stance, he laughed despairingly.
“That is crazy,” Shakun said. “I mean, that’s just crazy talk.
“We can have, and we should have, a very real long debate over what do you do about energy,” he added. “How do you move forward on carbon emissions? Do you work on sucking carbon out of the atmosphere? What do we do? That’s a serious, complicated question.
“We can totally disagree about what you do about it—but we have to settle on the really basic points of science.”
That’s the argument Hillary Clinton’s been making during this campaign. She’s pitching herself as the one candidate who agrees with an overwhelming scientific consensus.
“I’m running against a guy who denies science, denies climate change, says it’s a hoax developed by the Chinese!” Clinton said during an appearance with Al Gore, the former vice president turned anti-climate change crusader, earlier this month.
“Our next president will either step up our efforts to address climate change… or in the alternative, we’ll be dragged backwards and our whole future will be put at risk.”
Clinton’s climate-change plan includes half a billion new solar panels, beefed-up fuel-efficiency standards, and continued support for President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which would force power plants to cut carbon emissions and is currently in legal limbo.
When it comes to climate, though, Clinton has some liabilities of her own. Activists have criticized the Clinton Foundation for taking money from the fossil-fuel industry. And compared to Bernie Sanders—who called for an end to fracking and a new carbon tax—Clinton’s approach is relatively measured.
“She’s just clearly more of an incrementalist on this, and is going to push certain policy agendas like Obama has that move the needle, but only so far,” Shakun said.
Clinton’s also taken heat for saying she’ll put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business—though she immediately added: “We’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people. Those people labored in those minds for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives.”
This might be the one area where Clinton and Trump have even a glimmer of agreement: both say policies aimed at controlling climate change take an economic toll.
“Other countries are not adhering to the rules, we are, and it makes it impossible for our businesses to compete,” Trump told Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly.
Still, the choice for voters is stark. In the presidential race, there’s one candidate who thinks the science around climate change justifies some sacrifices—and another who scoffs at that idea.
