Windmills cause cancer. They’re killing birds and whales. Electric vehicles don’t work. Have you heard about the electric sharks? Climate change is a hoax. There are many things Donald Trump has said about climate change and renewable energy that are difficult to make sense of, but Trump’s newest line on climate change is both dumbfounding and truly dangerous: He is now determined to convince the world that climate change is a good thing.
Trump has certainly downplayed the effects of climate change in the past. He’s claimed rising sea levels will create more beachfront property, which would seem to be a misunderstanding of how land works. He’s talked about how people would actually be happy if it was a little warmer outside. Even Trump adviser Elon Musk, who runs an EV company, has downplayed the threat of climate change in recent months.
Now, 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.”
Maibach says that even the fossil fuel industry “acknowledges that the problems climate change is causing are real.” Furthermore, he says most of the American public is concerned about climate change, even if many Republican elected officials are not.
“Hardcore MAGA politicians and followers may buy the idea that climate change is good overall, but I don’t expect a majority of Americans will buy that,” adds Riley Dunlap, a professor of sociology at Oklahoma State University.
It’s not clear how the Trump administration would try to frame climate change as a good thing, but they wouldn’t be the first to attempt it. Conservative organizations that oppose climate action, often funded by fossil fuel companies and climate-denier donors, have tried to allay concerns about the climate in many different ways over the past few decades.
“Conservative think tanks like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, and the Heartland Institute published books and other literature arguing that global warming was not occurring, if it was it wasn’t caused by humans, and it would not be harmful and probably beneficial,” says Naomi Oreskes, a professor of the history of science at Harvard University.
Some of these organizations were also known for trying to convince the American public that tobacco wasn’t giving people cancer.
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.”
Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, says the argument that climate change will make the world greener is a common one among climate deniers. He says it’s a “terrible argument,” and recently wrote in the newsletter The Climate Brink that climate change actually “makes agriculture more difficult almost everywhere,” because of how it affects water supply, temperatures, and seasons.
“In reality, increased CO2 means disrupted ecosystems,” says Oreskes.
Not only is climate change not beneficial for agriculture or human health, pretending it’s not a problem or trying to frame it as a good thing threatens the future of the U.S. economy. If we’re promoting fossil fuels and abandoning renewable energy, we’ll fall behind in the global renewable energy market, and other countries will take the lead.
“The clean energy economy is going to be the economy of the future, not the fossil fuel economy,” says Maibach. “The energy transition is well underway. Its completion is inevitable. There are two questions: How quickly does that transition take place, and who is going to benefit economically from that transition? Right now, China is eating our lunch.”
Trump has tried to pull off many Big Lies over the years — and trying to convince the world that deadly heat waves, droughts, stronger hurricanes, larger wildfires, and more are things to get excited about is a bold one. The science doesn’t back it up, and that’s been clear for a long time.
Perhaps Trump will start caring about climate change when it starts to affect his own home at Mar-a-Lago, which is extremely vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
