President Dumbass and the Wildlife Panini Press

Trump thinks solar panels are cooking the animals. Somehow, his concern disappears when fossil fuels heat their habitat.

Donald Trump has discovered a threat to American wildlife so grave that he had to interrupt the business of running the country to warn us: solar panels are turning the animals into lunch.

“The animals jump on them and they fry,” he told a crowd in Lubbock, Texas, on October 27, explaining that the panels are hotter than a stove. Apparently, the renewable energy transition has been a gigantic outdoor hibachi this entire time, and nobody thought to tell the squirrels.

You have to appreciate the scene he’s asking us to picture. A perfectly healthy woodland creature encounters a solar installation and immediately launches itself onto the nearest panel, presumably after rubbing itself with olive oil. Somewhere in this imaginary ecosystem, a raccoon is desperately trying to read the instruction manual while a second raccoon insists the little red light means it’s ready.

The president has mistaken an energy source for a George Foreman grill.

This is a man with access to federal scientists, engineers, satellite data, and the entire Department of Energy. He can ask virtually any question about how electricity works and receive an answer prepared by people who have devoted their lives to understanding it. He has arrived at wildlife panini.

I would love to know how this works in his head. Does every rooftop installation require a little grease tray? Are the deer coming off medium rare? Has the Energy Department been suppressing a report titled We Regret to Inform You the Badgers Have Grill Marks?

There are real wildlife concerns associated with solar development, which deserve an explanation from someone whose understanding of the technology extends beyond the breakfast menu. Large projects can damage habitat, and birds can collide with infrastructure. Some concentrating solar towers use mirrors to focus sunlight intensely enough to injure birds flying through it. That is a different mechanism from animals hopping onto ordinary photovoltaic panels and frying themselves. The Fish and Wildlife Service explains both the risks and ways to reduce them. It’s available in writing, should the president ever experience a reading emergency.

We should choose sites carefully, protect habitat, and design projects to reduce harm. Those responsibilities require paying attention to actual animals. Trump has supplied a nature documentary directed by the man who thinks the toaster is watching him.

And then comes the part that makes the joke catch in your throat.

At that same Lubbock appearance, Trump announced plans to weaken rules intended to limit methane pollution from oil and gas operations. His EPA promoted the proposal as a way to expand fossil fuel production. Reuters reported that it would ease requirements for smaller wells and end a program that uses outside reports to identify major methane leaks. That was the actual energy agenda accompanying the imaginary animal barbecue.

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. Warming is already changing habitats and contributing to mass deaths of plants and animals. The IPCC has documented local species losses, heat-related mass mortality, and escalating risks as temperatures rise. These are observed consequences, with more danger ahead.

His concern for animals becomes difficult to locate once protecting them might inconvenience an oil company.

The squirrel can count on presidential intervention against a solar panel. Its forest will have to retain a lobbyist.

Animals need us to build renewable energy. They need humans to stop adding so much heat-trapping pollution to the atmosphere they also live in. A salmon has no use for a campaign promise about energy dominance. It needs water cold enough to survive in. Birds need habitat and food available when they arrive. Every species has needs that cannot be negotiated away at a rally.

The Fish and Wildlife Service makes the connection directly: replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy can help slow climate change, giving birds and their habitats more time to adapt. The people who actually work on protecting wildlife have managed to think beyond whether a duck might become a grilled cheese.

We need electricity. We need to produce it while giving the rest of the living world a chance. That means expanding clean energy responsibly, protecting habitat, and fixing the genuine problems with energy projects instead of handing the microphone to a man who has confused a solar farm with the hot-food section at Costco.

There is something almost unbearably revealing about his version of concern. An imaginary rabbit on an imaginary griddle gets a presidential speech. Real animals facing a warming world get another concession to the industries making it hotter.

They cannot vote. They cannot buy a table at a fundraiser. They cannot explain to him that their home is becoming unlivable. We can. And we owe them an energy policy developed by people who can tell a solar panel from a skillet.