One of the key elements of disinformation campaigns is demolishing real information. Sometimes, as in Winston Smith’s case in 1984, that means replacement of truth with lies. Sometimes, as in the Trump regime’s case, it means canceling the gathering of information altogether.
A week ago, Maxine Jaslow at The New York Times scrutinized the regime’s moves in A Trump Administration Playbook: No Data, No Problem. Killing solid, trustable, verifiable information by not gathering it allows you to say whatever you want with fewer or zero challenges. Whether that’s done by ending the requirement for thousands of industries to tally their greenhouse gas emissions or canceling the Agriculture Department’s annual hunger survey, the intent is the same — squelch knowledge to advance ideology.
Unfortunately for Donald Trump, when it comes to the climate, much as he would like to purge the studies of every climatologist — or maybe put these scientists in jail; who knows these days? — he can’t retroactively kill what is already known. And what’s known is that the 10 minutes Trump devoted to climate in his cringey 60-minute rant at the UN was a bodacious display of numbskullery and jackassery for which the much overused “unprecedented” just doesn’t cut it. “The ‘carbon footprint’ is a hoax made up by people with evil intentions, and they’re heading down a path of total destruction,” Trump asserted before the General Assembly.
Trump called on other nations to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate, something the U.S. did in his first term and is in the year-long process of doing again now. The regime is also pondering whether to withdraw from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the worldwide body that is holding its 30th annual Conference of the Parties in Brazil in November.
Trump said claims of rising temperatures have been made by “stupid people,” noting that “It used to be global cooling. If you look back years ago in the 1920s and 1930s they said, ‘Global cooling will kill the world.’ Then they said ‘global warming will kill the world.’ But then it started getting cooler. … [I]t’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”
Of course, we Americans have heard the likes of this (and the other subjects in his Tuesday spew) many many many times before. His childish vendetta against wind turbines verges on the psychotic. His doltish effort to extract and burn yet more oil and gas and keep coal plants alive and even start new ones is literally lethal. Some people might attribute this to “evil intentions.”
If only he were just someone’s cranky uncle mouthing off at Thanksgiving dinner, we could ignore this superannuated toddler instead of wondering every day how much wrecking he’ll be allowed to get away with. There’s both peril and profit in his words. He’s certainly doing the “best ever in history” to create the failing country that he claimed in his infantile UN splatterfest will happen to Europe if they don’t bail on the “green new scam” and stop adding wind and solar installations, and stop buying Russian oil and gas, and … wait for it … buy these fuels from the United States. This is Project 2025’s ”energy dominance” ideology at work.
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This speech is a wake-up call for Europe.
#Trump claims to "love Europe" yet attacks the transition. What he really loves is to sell his oil and gas to Europeans. It's as simple as that.
Our decarbonisation efforts are working against his fossil fuel agenda. #UNGA
www.lemonde.fr/en/internati...
— Neil Makaroff (@neilmakaroff.bsky.social) 2025-09-23T20:37:05.858Z
As usual, The New York Times is a mixed bag. Since Trump’s second coming, we’ve seen considerably less coverage of climate issues, as if they can’t chew on more than one crisis at a time.
Worldwide, the green transition is still happening at a speed that gives activists hope no matter what Donald Trump says. However, it’s not just the United States where there’s been a pullback from emission cutting and electrification goals as many governments in Europe and elsewhere move rightward. Not a full retreat, by any means, but a diluting of transition goals that were already too weak is rather obviously not the trajectory we need to be shifting to.
At the first Democratic primary debate in 2016, many people ridiculed Sen. Bernie Sanders when, asked what he thought the biggest threat to national security was, said unhesitatingly, the climate crisis. It still is. But Donald Trump and his fossil fuel pals are a close second.
