Oxfam activists wearing oversized masks representing world leaders, including Donald Trump (CR).Pablo Porciuncula/AFP/Getty

This story was originally published by Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In the past decade at the forefront of US politics, Donald Trump has unleashed a barrage of unusual, misleading, or dubious assertions about the climate crisis, which he most famously called a “hoax”.

This year has seen Trump ratchet up his often questionable claims about the environment and how to deal, if at all, with the threats to it. In a year littered with lies and wild declarations, these are the five that stood out as the most startling.

Upon re-entering the White House in January, Trump revealed an unusual fixation would become an immediate priority for his administration—the fate of an endangered, three-inch-long fish that lives in California.
The unassuming delta smelt, Trump said rather uncharitably, is “an essentially worthless fish” which had been lavished with water flows that should instead go to nearby farmers or help fight the devastating wildfires that were raging hundreds of miles south in Los Angeles.

On his first day in office, Trump issued an eye-catching executive order titled “Putting people over fish” that demanded water be diverted from the smelt’s habitat and towards needy people.

Experts were quick to point out that water situated so far away would not aid the firefighting effort in LA, with the small amount of water provided to keep the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta ecosystem intact overshadowed by the much larger forces at play in California, such as the climate crisis, which has spurred monumental droughts in the region.

Continuing on the aquatic theme, Trump’s first month in the most powerful office on the planet also included a bizarre tirade against offshore wind energy for its supposed impact upon whales.

The president said that “windmills”........

© Mother Jones