Today the British government announced that they plan to stop the sale of petrol and diesel cars in the UK by the the year 2040. That’s great news for the environment! This got me thinking about how trump responds to the notion of global warming, and what is his response. I used a small corpus of speeches by Trump in which he focused on energy.
My first concordance search was global warming. Start with the obvious!
Zero! In a corpus of 9,000 words, global warming isn’t mentioned once. It doesn’t exist, or at least, he’s not talking about it.
Then I thought I could look at clean, perhaps he had discussed the issue of clean energy in his speeches. I found that the word clean appears 8 times, 5 of them collocate with coal; he discusses clean coal, but never clean energy.
So, as far as he is concerned, clean energy is not an issue, although he does appear to support clean coal, clean, beautiful coal, if such a thing exists!
As a next step, I thought I would search for renewable , perhaps he would discuss renewable energy, wind, solar, hydro power etc. There were two examples:
In the first example, he appears to be arguing that if renewable energy is used as an energy source then a direct consequence would be the lose of jobs and a lowering in the quality of life if the US. In the second example, he is promoting nuclear power as clean, renewable and emission-free. I believe that history tells us differently in that instance.
The fact is that when Trump discusses energy, there is no mention of global warming, renewable energy sources of climate change. He is fully focused on increasing the extraction of coal oil and gas, which will be disastrous for the environment. Just by looking at some of his tweets, this is clearly seen:
And so I’ll end this with a collocational network of goal, gas & oil. And id Trump gets his way, we’ll be seeing a lot more of those in the coming years, and less clean renewable energy.
