Trump Convinced by Fake Greenpeace Co-Founder That Climate Change Is #FakeNews

Continuing its tradition of making presidential policy by telling Donald Trump exactly what he wants to hear, Fox & Friends aired an interview with a climate change denialist on Tuesday morning. The reaction from the White House was swift:

Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace: “The whole climate crisis is not only Fake News, it’s Fake Science. There is no climate crisis, there’s weather and climate all around the world, and in fact carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life.” @foxandfriends Wow!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 12, 2019

Fox has been happy to promote Moore as “the co-founder of Greenpeace,” which is inaccurate. He was involved in the organization in the early 1970s, when it was still known as the Don’t Make a Wave Committee and mostly protesting nuclear testing. He broke away from the group in the 1980s after it became too leftist for him. He has since made a career out of, among other things, trashing the idea of global climate change while on the payroll of organizations such as The Heartland Institute, the right-wing think tank perhaps best known for once partnering with Philip Morris to play down the toxic health effects of smoking.

In other words, he is not particularly credible when he calls climate change fake.

In his interview with Fox & Friends, Moore opened by calling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “a pompous little twit, twit meaning silly in the British lexicon and pompous meaning arrogant” over her Green New Deal plan. Shockingly, it did not get better from there.

Moore went on to make the statement that “there is weather and climate all over the world,” which no scientist or elementary school life-sciences student would disagree with. He also suggested that people in Canada and Russia wouldn’t mind if temperatures in those places got a couple of degrees warmer, suggested that scientists who believe in climate change don’t want to lose government grants, and that releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is a perfectly natural and safe activity and actually benefits the planet.If

Basically, he hit every right-wing talking point against taking climate change seriously. Mostly this involves smearing the people who study it and not recognizing that warming temperatures across the globe might have some negative effects in addition to allowing Moore to go outside in shirtsleeves in February in Canada.

Just in case anyone missed the point, later in the show the Fox & Friends anchors mocked a new initiative in New York City public schools to institute Meatless Mondays in cafeterias. The natural resources required to maintain herds of cows to produce meat are now viewed by climate scientists as a threat that contributes to rising temperatures and global scarcity, so the city’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, wants New York to take a small step towards cutting back on beef consumption.

Host Brian Kilmeade mocked the initiative and wondered if riding horses and eating only broccoli on Mondays is now the only way to save the planet, while Ainsley Earhardt complained that this is just “big government” telling people how to live their lives:

And in the White House, the planet’s most powerful man, who has every possible resource at his fingertips to educate himself, listens to this stuff and lets it shape his worldview and his administration’s policies.

Watch the video up top for Moore’s appearance, via Fox News.