President Donald Trump at the White House in Washington, DC. February 9, 2017.
Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images
President Donald Trump met with Republican leaders on Tuesday, and reportedly discussed an idea for his controversial U.S.-Mexico border wall: solar panels covering every surface to help cover the project's $70 billion cost.
Trump pitched "a wall 40 feet to 50 feet high" covered in panels to create "beautiful structures" that would help cover the wall's hefty price tag (Trump, of course, famously declared that Mexico would cover the cost). Even though this was almost certainly not Trump's original idea — Axios points out that the government has been soliciting designs since early 2017 — it has impressed the President, who allegedly told the Republicans in attendance that they were free to discuss it "as long as they said it was his idea."
Trump's apparent embrace of renewable energy comes less than a week after he exited the Paris Climate Accord, a broad and non-binding agreement of 196 countries to combat climate change. He has made the false claim that relying on renewable energies like solar will "lead to blackouts," and his budget requests a 69% budget cut at the Office of Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency while boosting fossil fuels.