Trump’s Environmental Claims Ignore Decades of Climate Science

In the final throes of the presidential campaign, Donald Trump is trying to cast himself as a protector of mother nature, even as he calls climate change a hoax.

“I’m an environmentalist,” he said this month in Wisconsin. “I want clean air and clean water. Really clean water. Really clean air.”

This past weekend, he falsely boasted about the quality of the environment when he was president.

“We had the cleanest air for four years of any country by far,” he said on Saturday in Novi, Mich. “The cleanest water. That’s what I want. I want clean air, clean water, and jobs.”

But as Trump talks of clean air and water, he regularly disputes basic facts underpinning contemporary climate science. His approach to the environment, which has been adopted across much of the Republican Party, would roll back regulations, expand oil and gas production and curtail the federal government’s regulatory powers.

As Lisa Friedman reports today, the Environmental Protection Agency would be a particular focus of a new Trump administration, which would “tear down and rebuild” the structure of the agency, said Mandy Gunasekara, a leading candidate to run the agency if Trump is elected.

These moves would come at a time when the consequences of man-made climate change are mounting. Last year was the hottest in recorded history by a wide margin. This year there have been 24 natural disasters that have inflicted at least $1 billion in damage in the United States, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.