Of the many perfidies that American society and the nations of the world have suffered during the second term of Donald Trump’s presidency, the denial of climate change is for me the most reprehensible and wicked. It taints the entire Republican Party with complicity in the endangerment of the life and health of billions of people around the world. The GOP has chosen to disparage responsible and compassionate precaution in favor of profit and unholy greed.
Somehow Trump and the Republican Party have managed to put in doubt the very foundation of climate change’s near-universal scientific validity. Almost the entire rest of the world considers climate change a potential hazard of catastrophic proportions. This is true for even gigantic greenhouse gas emitters like India, the European Union, Brazil, and also less dramatically for even China and Russia. The United States is the only major greenhouse gas emitter that has indulged in the fantasy that human-caused climate change is a normal, natural phenomenon. Our current leadership turns a blind eye to the reality that the US produces somewhere between 11% to 13% of the world’s lethal greenhouse pollution.
This is all particularly disturbing in that according to the United Nations, human-driven climate change is “the greatest threat the world has ever faced. … Everywhere, human rights are being negatively impacted and violated as a consequence of climate change. This includes the right to life, health, food, development, self-determination, water and sanitation, work, adequate housing and freedom from violence, sexual exploitation, trafficking and slavery,” said a UN spokesman in 2022.
We’ve known this now for decades. Even the U.S. Supreme Court, in a landmark 2007 case, Massachusetts v. EPA ruled that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are considered “air pollutants” under the Clean Air Acts of 1963 and 1970, signed into law first by President Lyndon Johnson and then in a more definitive version by President Richard Nixon. Yet, Trump’s EPA and others in his administration are close to declaring “total victory” over what they call “climate alarmism” linked to human pollution. Two weeks ago, Trump’s EPA rescinded a 2009 “government declaration known as the endangerment finding that determined that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare,” according to the Associated Press.
One might think that with all the media coverage of the potential disasters associated with climate change, “alarmism” would be dismissed out of hand as fatuous bunkum. Not so.
The mainstream media has acted as a hardcore Trumpian propaganda machine for over a decade. Trump and his antics take up so much space that hard news coverage, including climate change news, has declined something close to 25 percent since Trump’s first term. Election coverage is a case in point. The Columbia Journalism Review, for instance, estimates that Trump’s political circus received roughly twice as much airtime as his competition in the 2016 election. More urgently, Earth.org estimates that climate change coverage fell by more than 38 percent since 2021, due substantially to the over exposure of Trump’s every folly.
If the United States stops regulating its massive greenhouse gas emissions, what are the implications for the health and welfare for Americans and for everyone else in the world? Has Trump decided to wage war against humanity? It appears that he has.
If the US produces some 13 % of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions with regulation — that’s more than 6 billion tons into the atmosphere annually — how much could it emit without any regulation at all? Would its emissions double or triple? The only thing we know for sure is that they would spike and keep on spiking with nothing to check them, which would dramatically slow down the world’s efforts to curb the planet’s warming. Going beyond that tipping point of a 1.5C rise, which some contend has already happened, could result in an acceleration of on-gong natural disasters, from super hurricanes to biblical flooding, from conflagration wildfires to withering desertification and fatal drought.
The GOP’s success in deregulating greenhouse gases could also provide an excuse for other countries to diminish their own climate change initiatives. That’s why the ruination of sensible environmental safeguards and the industrial and urban pollution that results from climate change denial can only be thought of as a disgustingly immoral act of political and economic self-interest. To call climate change a hoax and brand it with the being “alarmist” has turned the Republican Party into a malicious and predatory danger to life on earth as we know it.
*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it
Re. Trump and the media, a friend observed – in 2016:
“He keeps on fiddling, and they keep on dancing.”
Nothing seems to have changed.