Donald Trump has spent the past month openly courting fossil fuel money and mocking the very idea of climate change. This delusional and catastrophic posture has barely registered in the US news media.

On November 14, the US Global Change Research Program released the Fifth National Climate Assessment, which found that the United States is already experiencing the severe impacts of climate chaos, driven primarily by continued reliance on fossil fuels. One week later, the Financial Times reported that the Trump campaign is embracing what it calls Project 2025 –– a 920-page conservative policy blueprint by the Heritage Foundation that, among other radical goals, urges the elimination of several energy department agencies and would overhaul the whole of the federal government to not only deny climate change, but actively promote it.

Yet one would hardly know any of this reading coverage of the odds-on favorite to win the Republican nomination and betting markets’ most-likely pick to be the forty-seventh president of the United States, Donald J. Trump. The former president has spent the past month openly courting fossil fuel money and mocking the very idea of climate change, and this objectively delusional and potentially catastrophic posture has barely registered a blip in the American news media’s radar.

A survey of major media outlets from the past month shows that many — such as NPR and the Wall Street Journal — haven’t mentioned Trump’s recent anti-climate demagoguery at all. And the ones that have typically frame it in terms of subjective “vanilla versus chocolate ice cream” partisan preference or a minor “energy policy” news item.

A New York Times “fact check” of a major “energy” speech Trump gave in Houston on November 2 didn’t bother fact-checking the most egregious lie Trump told, or heavily implied, several times in his ninety-minute address: climate action is pointless. His speech repeatedly belittles climate policy designed to curb fossil fuel extraction, but the Times’ Angelo Fichera is more focused on inflation and other auxiliary lies. Which are important, but given the stakes of a categorical climate denier being in charge for another four years, one would think the basic rejection of scientific consensus would merit at least a mention, if not deserve to be the central premise of the article.

The Washington Post’s November 10 covrage of Trump’s full-blown embrace of fossil fuels was given the “both sides” treatment, framing objections to the former president’s oil- and gas-only energy plan as an “environmentalists say” ideological position, rather than a factual one.

“Environmentalists say they’re not surprised by oil donors’ embrace of Trump,” Post reporters Josh Dawsey and Maxine Joselow inform us, “whose climate legacy they describe as disastrous.”

That full-blown climate denialism is disastrous is not a mere subjective assertion from an ideologically conflicted party, as presented by the Post. It is a uniform scientific consensus.

If Trump was standing on top of a building and told reporters he could fly, those opposing the wisdom of this position would not be framed as “Gravitists say Trump is unlikely to fly.” This immutable fact would be presented as reality, and the framing of the article wouldn’t be “Gravitists versus anti-gravitists” — it would be a piece about the denying of objective laws of physics, and the inevitable, violent implications of the most powerful person on Earth doing so. It would be a story of pathological delusion, not “some say” media refereeing.

Read more at The Guardian