How to Prevent Trump’s Climate Ruin
A leading world power has been taken hostage by a learning-disabled internet troll who can send civilization to climate ruin. Many are feeling devastated and hopeless.
A leading world power has been taken hostage by a learning-disabled internet troll who can send civilization to climate ruin. Many are feeling devastated and hopeless.
Cities are responsible for about 75 percent of the world’s total energy-related greenhouse gas emissions, while the vast majority of them are located on or near the coast, making cities especially vulnerable to the dangerous effects of climate change.
Trump has been elected president. Most people expect this to be bad news for climate policy.
But Trump has already contributed strongly to the effort.
Nobody who opposed Trump in this election needs to be reminded of his public stance on climate change. He is deeply in the denier camp of people who believe (or pretend to believe because it pads their bottom line) that climate change will go away if the scientists and activists will just shut up about it.
In the final weeks of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, he pledged to “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C. by, among other things, introducing tough new restrictions on lobbying.
Many people are fearing the worst. Trump, an avowed climate denier, has pledged to kill the Clean Power Plan, end clean energy research and development, and pull out of the Paris Agreement. Together, his policies could kneecap national and international efforts to curb global warming.
We used to say that global warming was like the steroid era in baseball: You couldn’t say that any single hit was the product of steroids, but the home-run boom looked awfully suspicious.
Likewise, the surge in extreme weather lined up neatly with the rise in carbon pollution, even if people couldn’t say that any one flood or heat wave was the product of human activity — at least, that’s how experts used to explain it.
The best explanation I read of Trump’s rise wasn’t published this week. It wasn’t published last week. And it wasn’t even published in the last 6 months.
If Democrats, Greens, and Independents are disgusted at the result of the election, and super fearful of what is to come, that could lead to an unprecedented progressive movement. Donald Trump could have been a gift that indirectly produces more good than harm. But that means three things:
The 2016 US presidential election — no matter who you ask — has been an unprecedented affair. The candidate at the top of the Republican ticket has no background in government and seemingly not more knowledge of political matters than he’s gleaned from watching Fox News, listening to and golfing with Rush Limbaugh, and trying to bribe politicians.