Let’s Be Frank, Donald Trump Presidency = A Lot More People Dying Early

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The cards are on the table. Based on Donald Trump’s flip-flopping over the years — er, over a matter of seconds even — it was not 100% clear what he’d be doing as president.

However, there were strong clues.

He has absolutely hated wind turbines for years. Whether that stemmed from some kind of hate for the wind itself (note his comments on hairspray), for how they look, or for assumptions he made about their effect on his property values, who knows?

He genuinely — on multiple occasions — called global warming a Chinese hoax. It was so insane that I think people didn’t know how to even respond to it.

Now that he’s appointed several people to top positions and nominated several cabinet members, it has become painfully obvious that he’s running with the conspiracy theories peddled by the pollution/premature death industry.

The people he has nominated are all but 100% certain to cut policies that force polluting industries to pollute less. That means that a lot more people — especially Americans — are going to die prematurely from cancer and heart disease. There’s pretty much not a single doubt about it.

Pushing for more fumes and toxins from burnt and unsafely mined coal, from burnt and haphazardly extracted natural gas, and from burnt and carelessly extracted oil, more Americans are going to die young.

More Americans are also going to suffer through cancers, heart disease, and other horrible effects of unregulated pollution.

And we haven’t even gotten to global warming. The unprecedented migration, the migration and resource wars, the extreme natural disasters, the extra flooding & drought, the more frequent wildfires and superstorms, and the more insidious spread of new diseases will take their toll on the generation of everyone reading this — but they will absolutely slam future generations and human society as a whole.

Your children and grandchildren are going to suffer the results of a much less stable and safe climate for the human species.

Do I think Donald is creating this horrible future on purpose? No, I think he’s just a conspiracy theorist who doesn’t understand many well known scientific facts and doesn’t care to learn (or have the ability to learn, as the case may be). I think he is abnormally biased toward predispositioned opinions and assumptions even when presented with facts from experts in their respective fields.

But the point is that our political and cultural atmosphere enabled someone like this to get into the presidency.

It enabled the incoming president to select a half-dozen or so conspiracy theorists and pollution-pushing extremists to run the EPA, Department of Energy, and NASA. It enabled this mass suicide list.

We have enabled it.

No one here should say “it wasn’t me,” because all of us could certainly have done a better job of bringing more sense and sanity to political, environmental, and economic discussions.

That’s the point of this article. The point is partially to help a few people (maybe) wake up to the early death Trump has ordered up for the American people and humans around the world already born or who will be born in the coming years. But the bigger point is to reiterate something I will push in more ways than I can currently fathom during the course of the next few years:

We (you, me, and your dog) need to get more involved.

  1. Take one of these 10 ideas for making your city better and run with it — pound away at it repeatedly until you achieve success.
  2. Join a political organization or campaign that you think can make a difference — whether Democrat, Republican, or something else. Obviously, I think we need more Democrats in office, but I also (perhaps more so) think we need sensible Republicans who understand science and have a moral backbone to take back their party. We need Republicans who will follow the wishes of their voters and promote solar energy, wind energy, electric vehicles, and overall climate and pollution action.
  3. Follow one of Joe Romm’s 9 great suggestions.

Also, of course, share this article, share CleanTechnica‘s most useful work more, and send us some cash so we can do deeper pieces, produce useful handbooks and reports that activists and policymakers can use, and inspire more people to adopt cleantech. Our PayPal email address is: billing@importantmedia.org


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Zachary Shahan

Zach is tryin' to help society help itself one word at a time. He spends most of his time here on CleanTechnica as its director, chief editor, and CEO. Zach is recognized globally as an electric vehicle, solar energy, and energy storage expert. He has presented about cleantech at conferences in India, the UAE, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, the USA, Canada, and Curaçao. Zach has long-term investments in Tesla [TSLA], NIO [NIO], Xpeng [XPEV], Ford [F], ChargePoint [CHPT], Amazon [AMZN], Piedmont Lithium [PLL], Lithium Americas [LAC], Albemarle Corporation [ALB], Nouveau Monde Graphite [NMGRF], Talon Metals [TLOFF], Arclight Clean Transition Corp [ACTC], and Starbucks [SBUX]. But he does not offer (explicitly or implicitly) investment advice of any sort.

Zachary Shahan has 7324 posts and counting. See all posts by Zachary Shahan