The Facts:
Lets start off by repeating what has been said a million times already. Climate change is real, is happening, and will have adverse effects. If you want to read about it, here are two very reputable sources.
If that’s not enough, the Department of Defense has considered climate change a top priority.
Ignoring this information, Donald Trump tweeted that he believed climate change was an invented hoax by the Chinese government to increase their manufacturing competitiveness. He tweeted this despite the fact that China is expanding clean energy very quickly.
During the first debate, Donald Trump denied calling climate change a Chinese hoax.
When it comes to climate change and jobs, solar energy jobs are growing faster than coal, oil, and gas jobs.
Clean energy (wind and solar) is currently the same price or cheaper than coal.
The Commentary:
As many people have said, climate change is one of the defining issues of our generation. There have been many environmental disasters in he past ranging from nuclear disasters to oil spills. Climate change is a climate disaster that effects the entire global. It is one that significantly effects nearly every human in the world.
The biggest question about climate change isn’t about if it is real or not, it’s why we haven’t made huge progress tackling it.
The reason fossil fuels have continually been invested in is because fossil fuels are big business. I’m not going to get into details, but it turns out that making money with renewable energy is like investing and fossil fuels is more like a high risk, high reward gambling. The money is quick with fossil fuels and it is slow with renewable power.
Big business likes quick money. If you look at the ten largest companies in the world, eight of them make money by polluting the planet. Each one of these companies grosses more than 200 billion dollar a year. Not a single one in the top ten is a green tech company.
There are many businesses in clean energy right now. Tesla, Sunpower, Vestas, GE, Siemens, and LG are examples of big players in the clean energy field. When you compare the size of these companies to the business above, they make one dollar for every one hundred spent by the big businesses.
It’s simple. Fossil fuel is big business. Clean tech is small business.
Lets bring the conversation back to Donald Trump. He has built his campaign around attacking big business and being an outside politician. Someone who is not bought by lobbyist or big business.
His complaint is that clean tech companies steal jobs away from fossil fuels. As the links above show, there are more jobs in clean tech than there are in fossil fuels.
The economics of fossil fuels gets even worse. If you look at just the cost to produce the electricity, wind and solar are very competitive, if not cheaper than coal or natural gas. When looking at the health effects, climate change, or any of the other adverse effects of climate change, the cost of fossil fuels ends up being two to three times that of clean energy.
So why does Donald Trump support fossil fuels?
The answer is that Donald Trump is beholden to the republican party which has been at war with clean technology since it has come out. Ronald Reagan famously ripped the solar panels off the white house. They believed that defending fossil fuels defended their base of supporters. They also defend big business that funds their campaigns.
Donald Trump then picked a running mate, Mike Pence, who is very friendly to coal and extremely combative to clean energy. Read about how his state, Indiana, has continually fought clean energy to keep four of the dirtiest power plants in the country. The four power plants are so dirty that people living next to them have a higher rate of death because of the bad air.
The reality is that Donald Trump’s platform that he is an outsider going up against big business is an outright lie. His stance on climate change has shown that he not only ignores the science on climate change, it shows that he will defend big business at the expense of citizens of the United States.