Trump campaigned on coal and has governed in climate denial

Bob Dylan was right; “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” 

The president should spend more time watching freakish weather patterns on the Weather Channel and less time viewing right wing bombast on Fox News.

Just about every climate scientist in the world believes that manmade carbon emissions are heating up the earth’s atmosphere. Most people understand the dangers of climate change.

They even get it in coal country.

The Associated Press reported last week that the Kentucky Coal Museum had switched over to solar energy to reduce energy costs.

{mosads}Neither scholarly research nor public opinion affect President Donald Trump. The prevailing winds buffet the president but he resists the storm of research and opinion.

The president recently signed an executive order that nullified many of the initiatives that Barack Obama took to protect the environment and fight climate change. Because Earth Day comes April 22, there is a great deal of discussion about the president’s executive order and environmental policy.

The president’s actions hardly come as a surprise. During his campaign last year, candidate Trump described climate change as a “hoax’.

The new president followed up his campaign statement by nominating a climate change denier, Scott Pruitt, to be the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. As the attorney general of an energy producing state, Oklahoma, he fought the agency’s efforts under the Obama administration to fight global warming.

The president also picked Rex Tillerson the head of Exxon/Mobil, one of the largest fossil fuel corporations in the world to be his Secretary of State. Tillerson’s position threatens United States participation in international environmental in international environmental agreements like the Paris Accords.

Recent national surveys demonstrate how out of touch the president is on environmental issues.

A Pew Research Center conducted in January revealed six out of every ten, or 60 percent of all Americans prioritize the development of alternative fuels such as wind and solar energy over the search for fossil fuels like oil, coal and gas, which only 25 percent of Americans support.

In time support for the development of clean energy will grow. More than seven in ten Americans under the age of 50 prioritize clean energy over fossil fuel.

Data from a Gallup Poll conducted late in March also demonstrates the priority that Americans place on environment protection. Close to Six in ten, or 59 percent of Americans believe environmental protection is more important than economic growth. A little more than one in four people worry a great deal about the affordability and accessibility of energy.

Frank Newport (a Republican pollster before he joined Gallup) and Andrew Dugan of Gallup think that the president’s unpopular positions on issues like the environmental account for his low job ratings and limit his capacity to improve his standing.

Newport and Dugan write that Trump’s executive order reversing Barack Obama’s environmental protection order “… could be an instance of Trump implementing or pursuing policy that is out of sync with board trends in American public opinion.”

Meanwhile Trump fiddles while the world keeps on turning and the earth keeps on burning.

Brad Bannon is a Democratic pollster and CEO of Bannon Communications Research. (He is not related in any way to the alt-right leader and Trump adviser Stephen Bannon.) Campaigns and Elections magazine called him a “mover and shaker” in the political consulting industry. He hosts and contributes regularly to the nationally syndicated progressive talk show, “The Leslie Marshall Show.” Bannon is also a political analyst for CLTV, the cable news station of the Chicago Tribune and WGN-TV. He is also a senior adviser to, and editor of, the blog at MyTiller.com, the social media network for politics.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.