Liam Denning, Columnist

Climate Denialism’s Stupidity Is the Point — And Its Weakness

Opponents of climate-change action depend on the kind of word salads and magical thinking Trump displays.

December 3, 2018 at 1:01 PM UTC

Liam Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy. A former banker, he edited the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column and wrote the Financial Times’s Lex column.

It’s exhausting to have to keep saying this.
Photographer: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images

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One problem I have with “climate denial” is the name. Nobody denies there’s a climate (not yet, anyway). I guess it fits better into a tweet, but that brings me to another problem I have with climate denial: It’s really stupid.

To illustrate what I mean, here’s President Donald Trump trashing his own administration’s dire climate assessment, published with impeccable timing on Black Friday, to the Washington Post last week: