The phrase that has come to define the Trump administration’s message on climate change was born in Durham, New Hampshire, on December 16, 2023.

Flanked by flannel-clad supporters holding “Live free or die” signs, then-candidate Donald Trump wished the crowd a Merry Christmas before launching into what he saw as the biggest faults of the current administration. He swung at President Biden himself (“crooked Joe”) and the state of the economy (“Bidenomics”). About 10 minutes in, he arrived at Biden’s climate policies, which he said were “wasting trillions of dollars on Green New Deal nonsense.”

But Trump wasn’t satisfied with his choice of insult, perhaps recognizing that echoing “Green New Deal” served to amplify his opponents’ pro-climate action rallying cry. So in front of the crowd, he began riffing on ways to undermine it in real time.

“They don’t know what they’re doing, but you’re going to be in the poorhouse to fund his big government Green New Deal, which is a socialist scam. And you know what? You have to be careful. It’s going to put us all in big trouble,” he said. “The Green New Deal that doesn’t work. It’s a Green New Scam. Let’s call it, from now on, the ‘Green New Scam.'”

The crowd roared, shaking their signs in approval. “I do like that term, and I just came up with that one,” Trump said. “The Green New Scam. It will forever be known as the Green New Scam.”

There’s been plenty of attention on Trump’s purge of climate change language, and for good reason: Government workers are tiptoeing around vocabulary they once used freely. “Clean energy,” “climate science,” and “pollution” are on the list of “woke” words federal agencies have told employees to avoid. Recently, a memo circulated at the Department of Energy’s renewable energy office advised employees to remove or rephrase basic terms including “climate change,” “emissions,” and “green.” But the administration is doing more than making these phrases disappear. It’s also introducing new language designed to undermine the foundations upon which trust in climate science and policy is built.

In the nine months since Trump began his second presidency, the phrase “Green New Scam” — always capitalized — has appeared in White House fact sheets and press statements, echoed across federal agencies and by Republicans in Congress.

“He’s quite effective at creating sticky phrases and using repetition to amplify them,” said Renee Hobbs, a communications professor at the University of Rhode Island who wrote a book on modern propaganda. “That’s the classic propaganda strategy, right? You repeat the phrases that you want to stick, and you downplay, ignore, minimize, or censor the concepts that don’t meet your agenda.”

It’s part of a broader effort to erase information about how the planet is changing. In recent months, the administration has axed entire pages about climate change and how to adapt to it, said Gretchen Gehrke, who monitors federal websites with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. The 400 experts working on the government’s next official climate report were dismissed, then all the past reports vanished, too. The administration has proposed stopping long-running projects that monitor carbon dioxide levels, and the Environmental Protection Agency is no longer collecting greenhouse gas emissions data from polluting companies.

You could see it as a three-pronged strategy. First, erase language related to climate change. Second, dismantle the scientific foundation supporting it. Third, fill the void with a message that matches Trump’s political priorities — like the “Green New Scam.”

“We’ve always understood language shapes reality, and language can create unreal realities,” Hobbs said. “And I think that’s what Trump is doing with his language of climate change.”

In Trump’s growing arsenal of anti-climate catchphrases, “Green New Scam” remains a go-to weapon. The Green New Deal concept was a ripe target for Trump because it serves as a catch-all for progressive positions, said Josh Freed, senior vice president for climate and energy at the think tank Third Way. “That was the target that I think Trump honed in on and flipped the script on, and turned it into a vulnerability and catchphrase for what he felt the public would see as positions that were extreme,” he said.

Trump has taken the idea to an international audience. In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly last month, he spent a full 10 minutes ranting off-script about climate policy, deriding renewables and international efforts to address climate change. “If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail,” he told the world leaders in attendance.

In the same speech, he went on to call climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” He also claimed that “the carbon footprint is a hoax made up by people with evil intentions.”

Conspiracy theories are a common tool in propaganda, according to Hobbs. “Conspiracy theories are catnip because they postulate this malevolent actor who’s doing something secretly to hurt people, and humans are hardwired to pay attention to stuff like that,” she said. Studies have shown that fake news about climate change is more compelling to people than scientific facts.

Still, Trump is fighting an uphill battle trying to paint climate change as fake. About 70 percent of Americans acknowledge that global warming is happening. Meanwhile, recent polling found that most Americans don’t trust Republicans on the environment, with only 23 percent preferring the party’s plan for tackling environmental issues.

But if a phrase gets repeated often enough, it can begin to bend reality, even if it’s inaccurate. It’s a rule that Trump intuitively understands, and a driving force behind his linguistic prescriptions. “I have a little standing order in the White House — never use the word ‘coal,’ only use the words ‘clean, beautiful coal,’” Trump said in his speech to the U.N. “Sounds much better, doesn’t it?”

Coal may be dirty by basically every yardstick people use to decide whether something is clean, but the phrase “clean coal” could still change people’s associations with the fuel. “If you can control vocabulary, you’re controlling thought,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania who has spent decades studying campaign messaging. Once we adopt a new set of terms, those words start doing the thinking for us, she said. People absorb the assumptions that are baked into them, often without even noticing.

Jamieson says it’s part of a broader strategy to boost fossil fuels over renewable energy sources like solar and wind. The Trump administration has canceled billions of funding in clean energy projects while simultaneously fast-tracking permits for new pipelines and other fossil fuel infrastructure. Last month, the Energy Department announced it would pour $625 million into rescuing the coal industry, which has been dying as natural gas and renewables have taken off.

“The administration is trying to align the vocabulary through which we talk about the environment with policies that are consistent with increased drilling,” Jamieson said. “You don’t have to do much work to see the relationship between the policies and the language.”

As for how to respond to propaganda, Hobbs said that turning to facts — like scientists and journalists often do — is not the most effective strategy. Research has long shown that feelings are more important than facts in changing people’s minds. “You fight propaganda with propaganda, right?” she said. Climate advocates are increasingly connecting climate change to inflation and the rising cost of living, in an effort to reach Americans struggling with high electricity bills.

On the micro level, Hobbs said she’s seen success in online experiments where people engaged in genuine, open conversations about different propaganda topics, from free speech rights to the role of social media influencers. The format prompted people to talk about conspiracy theories they’ve encountered, what feelings those stories evoked, and which ones were harmful. Participants were encouraged to open up about their uncertainties and where they were coming from — and in doing so, they often came to their own realization that their beliefs might be influenced by propaganda. Hobbs said that people decreased their fear of others who thought differently and became more critical about the information they were receiving.

“We can’t help but be exposed to propaganda,” Hobbs said, “but how we react to it is up to us.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/language/strategy-behind-trump-climate-catchphrase-green-new-scam/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

When Ted Bundy was a child in the 1950s, he hunted for frogs in the nearby swamps in Tacoma, Washington. The young Gary Ridgway, the future Green River Killer, grew up just a short drive north. Both men went on to become prolific serial killers, raping and mutilating dozens of women, starting in the 1970s and ’80s. These types of sociopaths are exceedingly rare, representing less than a tenth of 1 percent of all murderers by some accounts. Yet in Tacoma, they were surprisingly common — and there were more than just Bundy and Ridgway.

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In her new book Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Caroline Fraser maps the rise of serial killers in the Pacific Northwest to the proliferation of pollution. In this case, the lead- and arsenic-poisoned plume that flowed from Asarco’s metal smelter northwest of Tacoma, which operated for almost a century and polluted more than 1,000 square miles of the Puget Sound area, the source of the famous “aroma of Tacoma.”

Fraser grew up in the 1970s on Mercer Island, connected to Seattle by a floating bridge with a deadly design, not far from a terrifying lineup of serial killers. George Waterfield Russell Jr., who went on to murder three women, lived just down the street, a few years ahead of Fraser at Mercer Island High School. (No surprise, his family once lived in Tacoma.) She had always thought the idea that the Pacific Northwest was a breeding ground for serial killers was “some kind of urban legend,” she told Grist.

But after much time spent staring at pollution maps, and looking up the former addresses of serial killers, she came up with an irresistible hypothesis: What if lead exposure was warping the minds of the country’s most harrowing murderers? In Murderland, Fraser makes a convincing case that these killers were exposed to heavy metal pollution in their youth, often from nearby smelters and the leaded gasoline that was once burned on every road in the country.

Studies have shown that childhood lead exposure is connected to rising crime rates, aggression, and psychopathy. In children, it can lead to behavior that’s been described as cruel, impulsive, and “crazy-like”; by adulthood, it’s been linked to a loss of brain volume, particularly for men. Fraser doesn’t pin sociopathy solely on exposure to lead, though she suggests that it’s a key ingredient.

“Recipes for making a serial killer may vary, including such ingredients as poverty, crude forceps deliveries, poor diet, physical and sexual abuse, brain damage, and neglect,” Fraser writes. “Many horrors play a role in warping these tortured souls, but what happens if we add a light dusting from the periodic table on top of all that trauma?”

Fraser is a fan of true crime, but when writing the book, she tried to correct for what she sees as the genre’s problems, she said. Biographers often zoom in on a killer in isolation, like Ted Bundy or the Zodiac killer, and he comes off as some kind of mastermind. In Fraser’s telling, with all their deprived murders placed side-by-side, these killers seem patterned, almost predictable. “It was also revealing to see that they’re not only not as smart as we may have thought they were after Hollywood got through with them, but that their behavior is so similar,” she said. “Like, they’re almost kind of automatons, where their behavior’s very robotlike.”

Fraser draws a parallel between murderers as we normally understand them and more indirect killers, the book’s true arch-villain: smelting companies and the people profiting off them, like the famous Guggenheim family that acquired Asarco. In 1974, officials at Asarco’s Bunker Hill smelter in Kellogg, Idaho, did a back-of-the-napkin estimate and found that poisoning 500 children with lead had a legal liability of merely $6-7 million, compared to the $10-11 million they’d make by increasing lead production. So the choice was easy.

“The behavior of the people who built these smelters, invested in them, ran them, continued to emit tons of lead and arsenic into the air in populated cities — I mean, it’s beyond astonishing, what they did,” she said. Take Dr. Sherman Pinto, the medical director at the Tacoma smelter, who claimed that the lung cancer deaths among workers were simply because of pneumonia. “It just struck me how much their behavior is comparable to that of serial killers, because they’re constantly lying,” Fraser said.

Beyond the Pacific Northwest, the book follows the depraved behavior of Dennis Rader in Kansas in the 1970s and 1980s, and Richard Ramirez in California in the 1980s — both of whom also grew up near smelting. Even London’s famous Jack the Ripper was probably poisoned by the lead smelting boom in the 19th century, driven by demand for paint. Yet Murderland focuses on Washington state for a reason. When Fraser looked at the Washington Department of Ecology’s map of lead and arsenic contamination, she saw four plumes: The fallout from Asarco’s Tacoma smelter, another smelter plume in Everett, former orchard lands in central Washington that were sprayed with lead arsenate as a pesticide, and a cleanup site on the upper Columbia River.

“Every one of those plumes, including the most remote and least populated site on the Columbia, has hosted the activities of one or more serial rapists or murderers,” Fraser notes. (Israel Keyes, the serial killer and necrophiliac, grew up downriver from the Trail smelter in British Columbia.)

Leaded gas was fully phased out in the United States by 1996, and metal smelters have largely been decommissioned for financial reasons. But the legacy of lead remains with us. A recent experiment found that about 90 percent of toothpastes tested contained lead; a few weeks ago, the supermarket chain Publix recalled baby food pouches after product testing detected lead contamination. Last year, the Biden administration issued a regulation requiring drinking water systems across the country to replace lead pipes within 10 years, but the Trump administration and some Republicans in Congress are trying to roll back these protections.

“Regardless of whether you agree with my connection between lead exposure and serial killers, I do think people really need to be aware that that was a huge part of our history, and it’s still out there,” Fraser said. “I hope that this book does something to help people make connections between where they live, and what they might be exposed to, and what that might mean.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/culture/murderland-caroline-fraser-serial-killers-pacific-northwest-lead-pollution/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org