President Donald Trump is accustomed to slapping his name on buildings and golf courses, but he’s probably not used to having blind amphibians threatened by climate change named after him.
EnviroBuild, a U.K. company that offers environmentally-friendly building materials, placed the highest bid in an auction to name a newly discovered species of blind amphibian that buries its head in the sand.
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On Tuesday, they chose the name demorphus donaldtrumpi — and even created an image of the wormlike creature wearing Trump’s signature hair. But the naming wasn’t made out of fondness for the 45th president of the United States.
“Burrowing [his] head underground helps Donald Trump when avoiding scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change,” the company said in a news release. “As Demorphus donaldtrumpi is an amphibian, it is particularly susceptible to the impacts of climate change and is therefore in danger of becoming extinct as a direct result of its namesake’s climate policies.”
Trump has repeatedly denied there’s a real threat of climate change.
“The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive,” Trump tweeted in 2012.
The president is wont to deny climate change exists at all, and he pulled the U.S. out of the landmark Paris climate accord, which seeks to curb global emissions.
Climate experts in the U.S. and abroad have warned that the climate crisis is advancing much more rapidly than we initially thought, with a 12-year deadline to drastically reduce emissions before the effects of climate change become irreversible and cause global catastrophe.
Cover: Caecilian / Geotrypetes seraphini. Photograph Matthijs Kuijpers. Donald Trump Holds Media Availability In Portsmouth, New Hampshire Photograph: Matthew Cavanaugh. Photo montage creation: EnviroBuild.
