Faced with rapidly escalating disaster costs, the Trump administration took some steps to make communities more resilient to the effects of climate change, even if it refrained from using that term. But federal officials were also hamstrung by Mr. Trump’s insistence that climate change was overblown. In 2018, when FEMA issued its four-year strategic plan for dealing with disasters, the words “climate change” were nowhere to be found. Faced with year after year of record wildfires in California, Mr. Trump said the problem was too many leaves on the forest floor. Told that rising temperatures were exacerbating the problem, Mr. Trump responded: “It’ll start getting cooler.

Source: New York Times January 25, 2021 19:41 UTC