As a private citizen, Donald Trump didn’t mince words: Climate change was a hoax.
Since 2011, the New York real estate mogul tweeted his skepticism of climate change at least 115 times, according to a count by Vox, including multiple times when he referred to it as a hoax.
On the campaign trail before the 2016 election, he was just as clear.
“So Obama’s talking about all of this with the global warming and the—a lot of it’s a hoax, it’s a hoax,” he said in a December 2015 speech in South Carolina. I mean, it’s a money-making industry, okay? It’s a hoax, a lot of it.”
But since he moved into the White House, Trump has gone silent on this specific charge.
Even at his press conference announcing he would pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, Trump never said that climate change was not real, instead arguing that the deal was bad for Americans and wouldn’t do enough to help the environment.
“Not only does this deal subject our citizens to harsh economic restrictions, it fails to live up to our environmental ideals,” he said. “As someone who cares deeply about the environment, which I do, I cannot in good conscience support a deal that punishes the United States.”
So what happened? The answer may have something to do with a Supreme Court case which found that the greenhouse gases responsible for climate change are covered by the Clean Air Act.
Watch the video to learn more.
Get our climate newsletter. Learn how the week’s major news story connects back to the climate crisis.
