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Reader question: Please explain this headline: Trump’s “Dumpster Fire” of an Energy Policy a Roadmap to Climate Calamity My comments: By likening Donald Trump’s energy policy to a dumpster fire, they mean to say it’s not a well thought out plan, but instead one of chaos and, yes, mess. Mess, as in messy, as a dumpster is messy. A dumpster is of course a garbage can which is uniformly made and can be loaded mechanically on to a garbage truck. A dumpster fire is literally a fire in a dumpster. A fire in a dumpster? Well, say, someone throws a cigarette butt in a dumpster in a moment of carelessness, igniting a fire. What do you do? Call the fire department? Perhaps it’s not worth it. Try to bring a basin of water and dumps it on top of the dumpster? That may make it look worse, i.e. more messy than it is. Look on while letting the fire burn itself out? Sounds equally messy. What do you do? Well, anyways, a dumpster fire is an American idiom that stands for situation that’s gone out of hand and become messy and chaotic, disorganized and out of control. In our example, Donald Trump, the American President, doesn’t even believe that climate change is happening, that global warming is real, that the arctic is melting, so on and so forth. Trump doesn’t even seem to know the difference between weather and climate, seeing any icy cold winter day as evidence against global warming. | 
