In an hourlong address before the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 23, President Donald Trump lashed out at those promoting “the green energy agenda,” saying it had left many European countries “on the brink of destruction” and dismissing climate change as a “hoax” and “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”
Along the way, Trump made numerous false and misleading claims about renewable energy and climate change, many of which we’ve fact-checked before.
Wind Farms in China
Trump wrongly claimed that while China sells most of the world’s wind turbines, “they have very few wind farms.” In fact, China has more wind farms than any other country in the world, by far.
“Most” wind turbines “are built in China and I give China a lot of credit,” Trump said. “They build them, but they have very few wind farms. So why is it that they build them and they send them all over the world, but they barely use them? You know what they use? Coal. They use gas. They use almost anything, but they don’t like wind. But they sure as hell like selling the windmills.”
As we’ve written, it’s true that China dominates the wind turbine manufacturing market. According to Wood Mackenzie, a research and consulting firm, China led the global wind turbine manufacturers’ market share in 2023, accounting for 65% of global wind capacity.
But it’s not accurate to claim that China has very few wind farms. To the contrary, according to Global Energy Monitor, which produces data on energy infrastructure around the world, China had an operating wind farm capacity of about 444,000 megawatts, as of February. That’s about 44% of the global total and nearly triple the capacity of the U.S., which ranks second. China also ranks first in the number of operating wind farms, with 31.5% of the world’s total. That’s nearly five times the total in the U.S., which ranked fourth (Germany and France were second and third, respectively).
In a video address to a U.N. climate summit on Sept. 24, China’s president, Xi Jinping, vowed that China would double its wind capacity over the next decade, according to the Financial Times.
Trump also wrongly claimed wind energy is the “most expensive energy ever conceived” and that it can’t exist “without massive subsidies.” As we’ve explained, offshore wind energy is currently very expensive, but nuclear energy is typically the most expensive power type. Power generated from wind turbines on land is cheaper and has a similar or lower cost as natural gas and coal plants, even without subsidies, when using the standard measure of levelized cost of electricity.
In addition, he misleadingly mocked wind energy as “not strong enough to fire up the plants” and useless when “the wind doesn’t blow.” As we’ve written, wind power does come with extra variability, since the wind is not always blowing. Intermittency “would be a problem if we were trying to build an energy system that relied 100% on wind power,” Columbia University’s Matthew B. Eisenson told us for our February story. “But nobody is trying to do that.” People don’t lose power when the wind isn’t blowing because wind is one of many energy sources coming into the electrical grid.
Global Warming Not a ‘Hoax’
The president blamed tens of thousands of heat-related deaths in Europe each year on a lack of air conditioning, which he said is “all in the name of pretending to stop the global warming hoax.”
For a number of reasons, Europeans historically have used air conditioning to a much lesser degree than Americans. But it’s false for him to call global warming a “hoax.”
There is overwhelming evidence that the planet is warming and that it is being driven by human activity, as NASA says, and as we wrote in 2024. The most recent National Climate Assessment in 2023 similarly said, “Human activities — primarily emissions of greenhouse gases from fossil fuel use — have unequivocally caused the global warming observed over the industrial era.” As more carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases have been emitted into the atmosphere over time, land and ocean temperatures have risen, along with sea levels. On the other hand, sea and land ice have declined.
And temperatures in Europe in particular are increasing “at around twice the global average rate,” according to the World Health Organization. An August 2024 UN News report, citing the WHO, said, “A staggering 175,000 people die from heat-related causes every year in Europe and that figure is set to soar in line with our steadily warming planet.”
Using the Phrase ‘Climate Change’
Trump wrongly claimed that climate scientists have stopped using the term “global warming” because the Earth “started getting cooler” and “now they just call it climate change because that way they can’t miss.”
“You know, it used to be global cooling,” Trump said. “If you look back years ago in the 1920s and the 1930s, they said global cooling will kill the world. We have to do something. Then they said global warming will kill the world, but then it started getting cooler. So now they just call it climate change because that way they can’t miss. Climate change, because if it goes higher or lower, whatever the hell happens, there’s climate change. It’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion. Climate change, no matter what happens, you’re involved in that. No more global warming, no more global cooling.”
For starters, climate scientists have not stopped using the term “global warming.” As we wrote last year, it is still commonly used in academic papers — the term has appeared in more than 100,000 papers over the last two years, according to a Google Scholar search. It specifically refers to the long-term warming of the Earth’s surface.
Climate change includes global warming but is a broader term that can refer to other effects on the planet, including sea level rise, extreme weather and shifts in precipitation. The term is distinct and did not replace global warming.
Contrary to Trump’s suggestion, there was never a broad consensus from scientists that the Earth was cooling the way there is now that the planet is warming. And it hasn’t gotten “cooler.” While temperatures do not necessarily rise each year in each location across the globe, the trend of rising average surface global temperatures over time is unmistakable.
The four hottest years on record, according to NASA were 2024, 2023, 2020 and 2016.
Paris Agreement Funding
Trump also defended withdrawing the U.S. from the 2015 Paris Agreement to address climate change, which he misleadingly suggested was requiring the country to spend about $1 trillion.
“America was paying so much more than every country,” Trump said. He added, “For the United States, we’re supposed to pay like a trillion dollars.”
But the agreement didn’t stipulate each participating country pay a certain dollar amount. In part, it said “developed country Parties shall provide financial resources to assist developing country parties with respect to both mitigation and adaptation.” Developed countries agreed to collectively contribute a minimum of $100 billion annually to developing nations for initiatives reducing emissions.
We didn’t find a figure for how much the U.S. has spent in total because of the Paris Agreement specifically. Under President Barack Obama, the U.S. contributed $1 billion to the Green Climate Fund, which is an element of the pact and helps lower-income countries combat climate change. And under President Joe Biden, according to a November 2024 State Department update, the U.S. gave more than an estimated $27 billion for “international public climate finance” to developing countries.
When we asked for the source of Trump’s $1 trillion figure, the White House pointed to Biden administration policies. “President Trump was right – globalist Joe Biden forced American taxpayers to fund ridiculous climate goals and stifle our economy,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, told us in an email.
A July 2024 Politico analysis said that four major bills that Biden signed into law authorized about $1.6 trillion for “climate, energy and infrastructure initiatives” in the U.S. But that level of funding, some of which Trump has halted, wasn’t required by the Paris Agreement, as Trump’s remarks suggested. That funding also included money for non-climate projects, such as highway construction, lead pipe removal and semiconductor manufacturing.
Coal Not So ‘Clean’
While making a claim about energy reserves in the U.S., Trump again called coal “clean,” which it is not.
“I call it clean, beautiful coal,” Trump said. “You can do things today with coal that you couldn’t have done 10 years ago, 15 years. So I have a little standing order in the White House, never use the word coal. Only use the words clean, beautiful coal.”
But as we wrote this year, the Energy Information Administration says that coal production and consumption can negatively affect people’s health and the environment. For example, the EIA explains that burning coal emits toxic pollutants linked to respiratory illnesses and lung disease, including federally regulated pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and particulate matter. The Environmental Protection Agency also notes that more carbon dioxide is emitted from coal combustion than from any other energy-producing fossil fuel.
“At the present time, coal is not cleaner than its alternatives,” Joost de Gouw, a chemistry professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, told us for our April story. That’s despite the majority of coal-fired plants already using systems to reduce sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, he noted. “Compared with natural gas power plants that use combined cycle technology (the industry standard), current coal-fired power plants emit roughly 10 times more nitrogen oxides and 100 times more sulfur dioxide per kWh of electricity produced,” he said, referring to kilowatt-hours.
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