"As well as embracing ‘beautiful coal’, the president has set about obliterating clean energy projects"
"Six years after Donald Trump allegedly wrote a suggestive birthday note to Jeffrey Epstein, the current US president put his name to something that now seems almost as shocking: a letter calling for action on the climate crisis.
In 2009 Trump, then a real estate developer and reality TV personality, was among a group of business leaders behind a full-page advertisement in the New York Times calling for legislation to “control climate change, an immediate challenge facing the United States and the world today”. The US must lead on clean energy, Trump and the others wrote, to avoid “catastrophic and irreversible consequences for humanity and our planet”.
Today, the letter is jarring. The world continues to dawdle politically in its response to the climate crisis but clean energy is booming, responsible for almost all new energy capacity and drawing double the investment of fossil fuels globally. The market, as those business leaders from 2009 would now note, has shifted.
Most starkly, though, Trump has become the planet’s foremost advocate of fossil fuels, throwing the might of the US presidency into a rearguard battle to keep the world mired in the era of combusted carbon. There is now no fiercer single opponent to the collective effort to stave off climate breakdown than Trump."
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