Climate scientists overwhelmingly agree that modern-day climate change is real, mostly bad, and caused by people. But according to newly released emails, deceased child predator Jeffrey Epstein doubted that consensus.
A heads up: In addition to references to climate-related misinformation, this article mentions allegations of sexual misconduct and crimes.
Last Wednesday, the U.S. House Oversight Committee released more than 20,000 documents from the Epstein estate, including thousands of his emails. Epstein died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking minors.
The newly released documents show that in late 2016 and early 2017, after Donald Trump was elected to his first term, Epstein exchanged emails with celebrity physicist Lawrence Krauss, who at the time was the director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University. Epstein was a major donor to the Origins Project.
In the emails, which contain numerous typos and grammatical errors, Epstein pressed Krauss – who himself left Arizona State University in 2019 amid allegations of sexual misconduct – about several common claims by climate deniers. In each exchange, Krauss politely pushed back.
“i liked the argument that more co2 is good for plants?” Epstein wrote.
“yes, freeman dyson says that too,” Krauss replied, referring to a prominent climate denier. “He has cherry picked data, the typical act of those who believe the answer before they ask the question.”
In his next email, Epstein raised another myth: “is the south pole getting colder and more ice?” He added, “I m here with the trump peopl in palm and when asked i say i dont have any idea if this global warming is a threat that can be reduced.”
“I was in antarctica,” Krauss wrote. “The west antarctic ice sheet is melting at an unprecedented rate.”
A few months later, Krauss wrote to Epstein with a reaction to the Trump administration’s authorization of funding for NASA.
“This is not supporting science,” Krauss said. “It is all about the size of the rocket for him. All this will do is give him glory and not contribute to science.”
“you told me you were worried about space and i told you not to worry, he will decimate climate change. and support, verifiable projects,” Epstein replied.
Reached for comment by Yale Climate Connections, Krauss said he hoped he’d had an impact on Epstein’s perspective.
“I like to think I dispelled some myths, and provided him data to help do so,” Krauss wrote by email.
Trump echoes Epstein’s misinformation
Trump, another regular topic in Epstein’s email inbox, returned to power this year. Photographs and documents suggest that Trump and Epstein were close for years before reportedly parting ways. Trump has denied any involvement in Epstein’s crimes and has said he wasn’t a “fan” of the man.
“Well, I knew him like everybody in Palm Beach knew him,” Trump said in 2019. “I mean, people in Palm Beach knew him. He was a fixture in Palm Beach. I had a falling out with him a long time ago.”
Still, climate change denial was a common interest of the two men. The president has called climate change a hoax, and his administration has revived the misleading claim that carbon dioxide benefits crops.
Read: Fact-checking a Trump administration claim about climate change and crops
More significant is each man’s enormous wealth and personal or political power – and how they wielded both at the expense of many others.
One Epstein victim said recently that about 1,000 women had survived his abuse. As for Trump, his pro-fossil-fuel policies will lead to up to 1.3 million additional temperature-related deaths around the world in the coming decades, according to a new analysis by ProPublica and the Guardian.
Last summer, journalist Kate Aronoff described the parallels between climate denial and Trump’s efforts to deny his association with Epstein.
“Besides its rhetorical flourishes, the throughline between climate denial and Epstein denial is that the underlying harms at issue – catastrophic global warming, and decades of sexual abuse – are straightforwardly horrific. It boggles the mind to imagine that so many of the country’s most powerful people, Democrats and Republicans alike, spent decades either aware of or involved in crimes of that magnitude, looking the other way as victims continued to accumulate.”
“Monied interests’ efforts to deny and downplay the reality of the climate crisis – and their own products’ role in fueling it – are just as scandalous.”
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