Does Donald Trump really believe that climate change is a ‘hoax’ created by China? Bernie Sanders’ claim, explained

A few comments from Donald Trump‘s rambling and tech-issue-plagued Elon Musk interview on X caught the attention of Senator Bernie Sanders, who wrote on social media a few days later, “Donald Trump believes climate change is a ‘hoax’ created by China,” referring to something Trump said in the chat.

Sanders went on to add in his post, “[Trump] thinks global sea level rise is good because it will create more oceanfront property. He is a danger to our planet and to future generations.” Sanders’ post came in response to Trump telling Musk, “You know the biggest threat is not global warming when the ocean’s gonna rise one-eighth of an inch in the next 400 years and you’ll have more oceanfront property. The biggest threat is not that. The biggest threat is nuclear warming.” Trump didn’t explain what he meant by “nuclear warming” but presumably, he meant the effects of a possible nuclear war.

Trump’s 2012 climate change tweet

Donald Trump didn’t call climate change a “hoax” in his Elon Musk conversation, but he did minimize the threat. Bernie Sanders‘ X post, however, refers to a 2012 tweet in which Trump wrote, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” Trump later said he was joking, and tried to walk back the supposed China connection in a 60 Minutes interview, according to PBS.

Trump told the news program that year, “I think something’s happening. Something’s changing and it’ll change back again,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a hoax. I think there’s probably a difference. But I don’t know that it’s manmade. I will say this: I don’t want to give trillions and trillions of dollars. I don’t want to lose millions and millions of jobs.”

Trump’s muddled climate change message

Despite telling 60 Minutes he didn’t think climate change was a hoax, Donald Trump’s public statements referring to climate change have been mixed. “Nothing’s a hoax about that. It’s a very serious subject,” Trump said in 2020, according to the BBC. “I want the cleanest air, I want the cleanest water. The environment is very important to me. I also want jobs. I don’t want to close up our industry because somebody said you have to go with wind,” he said.

But according to Forbes, two years later, Trump was back to calling climate change “a hoax” on Fox Business Network’s Varney & Company. ” … [I]n my opinion, you have a thing called weather, and you go up, and you go down,” Trumps said.

Most crucially, Trump’s policies as president did not signal he took climate change seriously, rolling back several policies meant to help address the problem, such as withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement, among other examples.

Regardless of what Trump thinks, climate change is real

Despite Donald Trump’s wishy-washy and dangerous record on climate change, the vast majority of scientists agree it’s real and humans have contributed to it. Referencing the Musk-Trump climate interview, climate activist and 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben called it “the dumbest climate conversation of all time.”

Meanwhile, leading climate scientist Michael Mann added, “The damaging impacts of climate change, and in particular from more extreme weather events, such as wildfires, floods, heatwaves, more intense hurricanes, are actually in many respects exceeding the predictions made just a decade ago,” according to The Guardian.

And in response to Bernie Sanders’ “hoax” post on X, someone commented, “Denying climate change is a threat to our planet’s future. We need leaders who take this seriously. #ClimateAction.”