Trump’s Climate Policy Decisions: Fruit Of The Poisonous Tree

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“Fruit of the poisonous tree” is a doctrine that extends the exclusionary rule to make evidence inadmissible in court if it was derived from evidence that was illegally obtained. As the metaphor suggests, if the evidential “tree” is tainted, so is its “fruit.” The fruit of the poisonous tree analogy has merit in application to Trump administration rejections of science-based climate policies.

Earlier this month, US President Donald Trump issued an executive order to block state laws that are meant to reduce the use of fossil fuels and to combat climate change, including ESG initiatives and environmental justice.

The American Petroleum Institute, an oil and gas trade group, praised the order. This is not a coincidence.

Indeed, that endorsement brings us back to the fruit of the poisonous tree metaphor.

A meeting between Trump and fossil fuel company executives took place at Mar-A-Lago a year ago. During the tête-à-tête, Trump pitched an idea. The polluters should donate $1 billion to get him re-elected. The quid pro quo? Once in office, he vowed to immediately reverse dozens of President Joe Biden’s environmental rules and policies and stop new ones from being enacted. Giving $1 billion would be a “deal,” Trump said, because of the taxation and regulation the execs would avoid.

Trump’s pitch to Big Oil worked, and it is the first instance in contemporary US history where any of the three branches of government has wielded such power — power that is transactional in nature and which threatens the health of US citizens and the planet.

The Trump administration intends to increase oil and gas output and coal production as well as halt existing policies to curb carbon emissions. It has reneged on federal grants, fired workers en masse, and attacked longstanding environmental regulations. It has frozen funds appropriated by Congress for clean energy projects and taken particular aim at wind energy, the country’s largest source of renewable power.

Granted, the US government has bowed to the all-powerful fossil fuel industry for years, thus impacting the upward trajectory of clean energy adoption. The Trump administration, however, has based its entire climate policy agenda on fossil fuel industry false research. Trump insists — in narratives filled with hyperbolic disinformation — that climate science is flawed and, so, he claims, he is doing US citizens a favor by elevating the importance of US gas and oil.

What’s left unsaid is that the fossil fuel industry has known about climate change for as long as climate scientists have.

A Primer in What the Fossil Fuel Industry Knew and When They Knew It

Starting in the 1950s, the fossil fuel industry hired its own researchers, who collected data, analyzed climate models, and recommended that alternatives to fossil fuels might be in the industry’s best interests.

These researchers came to terms that air temperatures on Earth have been rising since the Industrial Revolution. By the time George H.W. Bush ran successfully for president in 1988, he had promised to use the power of the “White House effect” to fight the “greenhouse effect.” In 1992, Bush and other world leaders gathered in Rio de Janeiro to sign the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Together, 178 countries promised action to prevent “dangerous anthropogenic interference” with Earth’s climate.

While natural variability plays some part, the huge body of evidence has indicated all along that human activities — particularly emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases — are mostly responsible for making our planet warmer. Across production, transportation, and use, fossil fuel technologies are the main drivers of energy waste. Over 75% of energy losses are directly attributable to fossil technologies, with fossil fuel-fired thermal power plants and internal combustion engines leading the way. These two technologies combined are responsible for almost half the energy waste globally.

Big Oil has faced an existential threat from clean energy for decades, so carefully designed narratives that question the truth about clean energy are pervasive and persuasive.

Instead of following the recommendations of their own researchers and reinventing the way that energy companies do business, the fossil fuel industry embarked on disinformation campaigns. They sewed doubt about climate science and persuaded mass media owners to write from a perspective of false equivalence about fossil fuels. Resulting media stories indicated that value in fossil fuels offset any pollution that may occur.

Fossil fuel companies became profitable beyond anyone’s dreams.

Enter the Transactional President and His Self-Serving Entourage

Donald J. Trump 2.0 withdrew from the Paris Agreement, which is designed as a global initiative to limit warming. He ordered government websites that hosted climate data to pause. He negated support for research that includes the word “climate.” He is dismantling the federal agencies responsible for supporting climate science and for maintaining climate data.

News articles that offer evidence about the power and place of renewable energy sources are being censored by the authoritarian Trump regime. The Interior Department is planning to fast-track approvals for projects involving coal, gas, oil and minerals on public lands — all the while declaring that the US is experiencing an energy emergency.

Trump and his sycophants refuse to recognize the bigger picture of clean energy as he conducts transactional arrangements. As Lanre Olagunju writes on The Cable, their goal “is to sow confusion, stall policy action, and protect economic and geopolitical interests that benefit from maintaining the status quo.” White House shills hobnob with major oil corporation lobbyists. The lobbyists actively fund and spread disinformation to manipulate climate discourse, “aligning narratives with their economic interests and delaying the global transition to clean energy.”

The fruit of the poisonous tree destabilizes scientific peer-reviewed evidence, flames economic fears, and reinforces climate obstruction.

Designated paid climate entrepreneurs promote conflict around fossil fuel-driven pollution. They bombard social media networks with culturally appealing populist narratives. They incite confusion and anger in an effort to undermine governance that looks ahead to a zero emissions future.

Speaking out for the Climate

According to the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Global Risks Report, climate disinformation is a top threat to global stability. In an attempt to shape discourse that reflects actual climate reality, 55 climate information integrity groups and 42 leading climate scientists and experts signed a late 2024 open letter that urged countries to counter the risk of false and misleading climate claims.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called for an end to fossil fuel advertising. “The godfathers of climate chaos – the fossil-fuel industry – rake in record profits and feast off trillions in taxpayer-funded subsidies,” Guterres explained. “It is a disgrace that the most vulnerable are being left stranded, struggling desperately to deal with a climate crisis they did nothing to create.”

The Institute for Global Environmental Studies wrote a policy brief this year that examined Trump’s climate policy actions and their possible consequences.

“Trump’s signature economic policies, especially tariffs, immigration restrictions, and deportations, could disrupt supply chains and slow economic growth, thereby actually reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, similar to the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic. Ironically, these policies could be the Trump administration’s unintended major contribution to GHG reductions, although at the expense of people’s livelihoods rather than through investments in a sustainable energy transition.”

It’s time to uphold laws that seek to hold fossil fuel companies financially responsible for damage caused by the burning of three planet-warming fossil fuels – coal, oil, and gas. Legislating a Superfund forces major oil and gas companies to pay up for mounting climate damages caused by the burning of their products over the last two decades. It will take determined citizens and their representatives to stand up to the Trump fiasco, however.