By Thor Benson
Trump is aiming to use the power of the federal government to reframe climate change as something that will benefit humanity.
Trump is reportedly intent on rewriting an Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 endangerment finding, which found greenhouse gases are a threat to public health and welfare, in order to downplay the negative effects of climate change. He’s working to decimate climate reporting in general. He also wants to muddy the waters by producing a National Climate Assessment written by climate deniers who argue that the impacts of climate change are overstated — or would even be a net positive.
“This position ignores 50 years of top-quality science analyzing the potential impacts of climate change,” says Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University.
This effort is apparently supported by Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought, who was one of the authors of Project 2025. Rolling Stone reached out to Vought’s office for comment but did not receive a response before this article was published.
“The Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding,” Vought wrote in Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for Trump’s second term.
Climate experts say any effort to present climate change as a good thing is dangerous and runs afoul of science. It’s been known for decades that climate change will have catastrophic impacts on human life if the world doesn’t move quickly to end its use of fossil fuels.
“It’s so outrageous that no one except [Trump] would try to do this,” says Edward Maibach, director of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication. “In America, anyone is free to call devastating storms, floods, droughts, air pollution, killer heatwaves, and a growing threat of mosquito- and tick-borne diseases a good thing. But saying it doesn’t make it true.”
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Multiple arguments have been made in the past to support the idea that climate change could have positive effects. These arguments include that warmer weather would extend the growing season for crops; that warming temperatures will mean fewer people will die from extreme cold; and that more CO2 in the atmosphere will mean plants will grow better. Climate experts argue these claims are false, misleading, or missing context.
“The notion that more CO2 in the atmosphere is going to somehow help plants is absolutely a torture of the actual scientific facts,” Maibach says. “In reality, the more CO2 and the warmer it gets, the more likely we are to have weeds and the less likely we are to have plants growing that are used to feed people.”
