Still thinks it's just the weather ... or something, something.
In the three grueling hours of Republican debate Wednesday night, three of the candidates spent three whole minutes talking about climate change. In doing so, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie and Scott Walker followed what has become a general Republican shift toward avoiding outright denial about the crisis we face. But they were adamant about not doing anything about it. Each of them offered some version of screw-regulation-Obama's-climate-policy-proposals-will-wreck-the-economy-and-kill-jobs.
It fell to Donald Trump to spew the flat-out denier trope, but he had to wait to do it until Thursday morning in an appearance of Morning Joe. (You can see him saying this starting 8:02):
“I consider climate change to be not one of our big problems. I consider it to be not a big problem at all. I think it’s weather. I think it’s weather changes. It could be some man-made something. But, you know, you look at China, they’re doing nothing about it. Other countries are doing nothing about it. It’s a big planet.”
It's true that China emits more greenhouse gases than any other nation. But the U.S. still leads in that department on a per capita basis and has cumulatively added more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anybody else. It's also true that China, like most other nations, is not doing enough on climate change and is still heavily dependent on fossil fuels, especially coal. But the notion that it's doing
nothing is as bogus as Trump's claims none of his operations have ever gone bankrupt.
In 2014, China invested $89.5 billion in clean energy projects, more than any other nation. The United States invested $51.8 billion. The Energy Information Administration notes that “China is also aggressively investing in solar power and hopes to increase capacity from 15 GW at the end of 2013 to 100 GW by the end of 2020.” Wind power too has been rapidly growing in China. It also has imposed limits on coal imports and setting a cap on coal consumption starting in 2020. And the Obama administration managed to craft a pact with China that will put a cap on its emissions and lead to reductions after 2030.
We climate hawks want to see more, far more, of course. And we have no love for the administration's "all-of-the-above" approach on energy. But Trump and the Republicans on the dais who spoke on climate change in the debate argue against the clean-energy policies that President Obama supports (and that he used to budge Beijing in a better direction) and say they shouldn't be happening at all. And they are determined to keep doing whatever they can to squelch them. They are clowns, to be sure. But what they espouse regarding climate change is anything but funny.
Oh, and by the way, Donald, it's a small planet. The only one we've got.