Tag Archives: climate change

The America Trump Wants for You & Your Children

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Meidas+ (meidastouch@substack.com) published a list of 200 reasons to vote against Donald Trump. The list was originally created by Mark Jacob, former editor at the Chicago Tribune, author, and writer of the newsletter Stop The Presses. It contains many duplications. I have reorganized and supplemented the list. None of these points is in doubt. None.

Iif this is the country you want to live in and that you want your children and grandchildren to live in, vote for Trump/Vance. You will be doing so knowing that Trump plans to turn the United States into a gulag-ridden hellscape for everyone and particularly for women and children. You will know that the United States will no longer support action to control climate change.

Consider that if Trump attempts to execute his plan for the country, and there is every reason to think he will, can you reasonably expect the Russian government under the thumb of dictator Vladimir Putin to just sit quietly by and send Trump a congratulatory cake? Can you reasonably expect America’s current allies in NATO and elsewhere around the world to just say, “well, OK, no worries, the US is destroyed as a democracy, but we’re still fully aligned?” Historically, isolationist policies have led the United States into wars. If Trump wins, Russia will overrun Ukraine, and the NATO allies will be next.

Consider the implications of the dismantling of the federal system of Cabinet-level departments and administrative agencies responsible for implementing the multitude of laws enacted by Congress. Trump says he going to “shut down,” among others, the Department of Education.

Consider the implications of replacing the federal workforce with people whose primary “skill” is unquestioning obedience to whatever Trump decides he wants any given day. Here is the list of some of Trump’s past conduct showing that he is an existential threat to the nation:

  1. Trump incited a deadly assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021; he has resisted every effort at accountability; the Supreme Court has held that he is above the law when, for example, he tries to compel the Justice Department to support his false claims of a stolen election. Trump will not accept defeat in 2024.
    • Trump pushed the fake-electors scheme to overturn a fair election, knowing the scheme had no lawful basis. He knew it and every Republican who still supports knew and knows it.
    • Trump lied that there were “205,000 more ballots than you had voters” in PA.
    • Trump lied that “the entire Database of Maricopa County in Arizona has been DELETED!”
    • Trump falsely accused 2 Georgia election workers of election fraud – the same allegations that led to a $148M judgment vs. Rudy Giuliani.
    • In late 2020,  Trump delayed transition talks with the Biden team even though the stonewalling hurt public health efforts during a pandemic.
    • Trump’s coup attempt projected such instability that Gen. Mark Milley assured his Chinese counterpart that the U.S. planned no attack. This infuriated Trump, who suggested Milley deserved execution: “In times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH!”
    • Trump plans to pardon the rioters who beat up police officers at the Capitol.
    • Trump did nothing but watch for 187 minutes as his followers stormed the Capitol.
    • Trump spread false claims that mail-in voting would lead to massive fraud, even though it’s been used safely for decades.
    • Trump repeatedly lied about voter fraud to undermine confidence in the 2020 election.
    • Trump tried to overturn the election results by pressuring Georgia officials to “find” votes in his favor.
    • Trump tried to use the Department of Justice as his personal legal defense team, undermining the rule of law.
    • Trump pushed baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, including claims of rigged voting machines.
    • Trump repeatedly undermined the credibility of U.S. elections, a cornerstone of democracy.
    • Trump attempted to sabotage the U.S. Postal Service ahead of the 2020 election to disrupt mail-in voting.

2. Trump’s extremist justices took away women’s right to control their own bodies.

3. Trump wants more huge tariff increases, which are a tax on American consumers; the Tax Foundation estimates loss of more than 684,000 full-time equivalent jobs as result.

4. Trump stole top secrets, lied about what he had, refused to return them, and left them exposed to unauthorized viewers in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom.

5. Trump bragged about grabbing the private parts of women he’d just met. Trump regards women as property.

6. Trump called for a “day of violence” in which police could do whatever they wanted with no accountability.

7. Trump threatens mass deportation of undocumented immigrants – imagine what will happen when many resist and others come to their aid. Read this: https://open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p/twelve-million-deportations?r=4gbf6r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

8. Trump called his opponents “vermin,” echoing hate speech from the Holocaust and the 1994 Rwanda massacre.

9. Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement on climate change. He means to give the oil companies and others free rein to destroy the climate. Read this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/10/17/oil-industry-trump-climate-lobbying/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F3f56fd8%2F6712886b1ab9a5507

10. Trump said his next administration would give a major health policy role to anti-vaxxer RFK Jr., a disturbed person who dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park and cut off the head of a dead whale with a chainsaw and strapped it to the roof of his minivan.

    • Trump’s lies and incompetence likely led to hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths from Covid-19.
    • Trump lied publicly that Covid-19 was “like a regular flu that we have flu shots for” while he privately said it was “more deadly than even your strenuous flu.” He continued lying throughout the worst of the pandemic, claiming repeatedly that COVID “will just go away.”
    • Trump suggested that putting light in people’s bodies and injecting them with disinfectant could kill Covid.
    • After the right demonized Anthony Fauci, Trump claimed not to know who gave Fauci a presidential commendation. It was Trump.
    • Trump secretly shipped Covid test equipment to Putin when it was needed in the U.S.
    • Trump downplayed the importance of wearing masks during the Covid-19 pandemic, leading to unnecessary deaths.
    • Trump undermined pandemic relief efforts by refusing to sign stimulus bills until they included unrelated demands.
    • Trump downplayed the threat of Covid-19 despite knowing how dangerous it was.
    • Trump pressured governors to reopen their states during the Covid-19 pandemic against public health advice.
    • Trump’s administration ignored early warnings about the Covid-19 pandemic, delaying critical responses.

11. Trump helped the Saudis cover up the murder and dismemberment of a U.S.-based journalist.

12. Trump wants to use the military to put down “the enemy from within” – meaning anyone who opposes his agenda.

13. Trump lied that “Dems want to shut your churches down, permanently.”

14. Trump’s administration separated migrant children from their parents and then lost track of the parents. They didn’t and don’t care.

15. Trump increased the national debt by 39% in just 4 years while giving the rich a big tax cut.

16. Trump had to pay $2 million in a lawsuit over the Trump Foundation’s misuse of charity funds.

17. On 9/11, Trump bragged that the fall of the Twin Towers meant his building was NYC’s tallest. That’s all he was concerned about.

18. Trump touted his business acumen but couldn’t make a profit from casinos and filed for bankruptcy six times.

19. Trump threatened to withdraw the U.S. from NATO, a key alliance for global stability. Next time, he’ll do it.

20. Trump made false statements more than 30,000 times as President.

21. rump lied that an “extremely credible source” told him Obama’s birth certificate was fake. After years of pushing the birtherism hoax, Trump admitted it was bunk — and he blamed it on Hillary Clinton.

22. Trump took Putin’s word over the word of U.S. intel agencies regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election.

23. Trump insulted Gold Star parents whose son, a U.S. soldier, had been killed in Iraq. The family was Muslim.

24. A court found Trump and his adult sons liable for business fraud and canceled the Trump Organization’s business certification.

25. After a MAGA supporter massacred Latinos in El Paso, Trump and his wife went to the city and used a newly orphaned baby as a prop for a photo op.

26. Trump lied that “we’re the highest taxed nation in the world.”

27. Trump lied by tweet in 2019: “Today I opened a major Apple Manufacturing plant in Texas.” In fact, the plant had opened nearly 6 years earlier.

28. Trump lied when making the absurd claim that people weren’t allowed to say “Merry Christmas” until he came along.

29. Trump denounced 4 women in Congress who are members of minority groups, telling them to go back where they came from, even though 3 were born here and the 4th immigrated as a child.

30. Former Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Trump wanted to shoot social justice protesters. “We reached that point in the conversation where he looked frankly at Gen. Milley and said, ‘Can’t you just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something?'”

31. Trump lied that the strategic oil reserve was “mostly empty” and that he filled it. In fact, the reserve was lower at the end of his term than at the start.

32. Trump overruled experts to give a security clearance to Jared Kushner, who later leveraged his access to get $2B from the Saudis.

33. Trump is a racist bigot. He said in 1991: “I have black guys counting my money. … I hate it. The only guys I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes all day.”

34. Trump said in 2015 he favored the creation of a database to track all Muslims in the U.S.

35. Trump asked in 2016 if women should be charged with a crime for having an abortion despite a ban, he said: “The answer is that there has to be some form of punishment.”

36. Trump defended Putin in 2015: “Nobody’s proven that he’s killed anybody.”

37. In 2016, he called for not only killing terrorists but killing their family members, too.

38. Trump invited Russians into the Oval Office and shared classified information.

39. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, was convicted of 17 tax crimes, including conspiracy and falsifying business records.

40. Trump called for government crackdowns on MSNBC and CBS because he didn’t like their coverage of him.

41. Trump’s pardon got Steve Bannon out of federal fraud charges in a “build the wall” scam. Right-wing disinformation is Bannon’s game: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t.”

42. Trump praised Hungarian despot Viktor Orban as “one of the strongest leaders anywhere in the world.”

43. A Trump golf club put up a marker about a “River of Blood” at a Civil War battle that supposedly took place there. But no such battle occurred. It’s a lie.

44. Several Trump golf clubs displayed a Time magazine cover featuring him. You guessed it: It’s fake.

45. Trump pardoned Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who had been convicted of ignoring a court order to stop profiling Latinos.

46. Trump lied about Mika Brzezinski’s husband/co-host: “When will they open a Cold Case on the Psycho Joe Scarborough matter in Florida. Did he get away with murder? Some people think so.”

47. Trump hired Kellyanne Conway as a professional liar, and she fulfilled that role, saying early in the pandemic that Covid was “contained,” calling lies “alternative facts” and referring to a terrorist attack that never happened: the “Bowling Green Massacre.”

48. Trump praised China’s dictator Xi Jinping as “brilliant” and “strong like granite.”

49. Trump quit the Iran nuclear deal, raising the chances of nuclear war.

50. Trump told his Cabinet that the Soviet Union was justified in invading Afghanistan in 1979.

51. After former Klan leader David Duke endorsed him for president, Trump said: “I don’t know David Duke. … I just don’t know anything about him.” But researchers found video clips showing Trump talking about Duke on national TV multiple times.

52. Trump refused to attend his successor’s inauguration, becoming the first president to boycott the transition since Andrew Johnson in 1869.

53. Trump tore up official documents, forcing aides to tape them together to preserve them as required by federal law.

54. Trump endorsed NC gov candidate Mark Robinson, a Holocaust denier who called Obama a “top-ranking demon” and said, “I absolutely want to go back to the America where women couldn’t vote.”

55. Trump’s social-media Christmas wish for his opponents: “May they rot in hell.”

56. Trump used the South Lawn of the White House for a partisan event, ignoring precedent and propriety, when he gave his 2020 Republican National Convention speech there.

57. Trump, asked about QAnon, the conspiracy cult that claims JFK Jr. is still alive and Democrats kidnap children to harvest their blood, said: “I don’t know much about the movement other than I understand that they like me very much, which I appreciate.”

58. Trump lied that U.S. Steel was building 6, 7, 8, or 9 new plants (the number varied). But the company built no new plants.

59. Asked about charges for Ghislaine Maxwell for conspiring with sex predator Jeffrey Epstein, Trump said: “I wish her well, frankly.”

60. Trump lied that he received “the highly honored Bay of Pigs award” from Cuban Americans in Florida. There’s no such award.

61. After a 75-year-old social justice protester in Buffalo, NY, was shoved to the ground by police and suffered a fractured skull, Trump suggested it was a “set-up” by “an antifa provocateur.” Trump tweeted that the activist “fell harder than [he] was pushed.”

62. Trump lied that Obama spied on his campaign.

63. Trump said: “We will be ending the AIDS epidemic shortly in America and curing childhood cancer very shortly.”

64. Trump’s Agriculture Dept. ordered staff to stop referring to “climate change” and call it “weather extremes” instead.

65. Trump is selling watches, crypto, and sneakers. Trump’s “God Bless the USA” Bibles were printed in China.

66. Credible evidence indicates that Egypt gave Trump’s campaign a $10M bribe.

67. Trump opened most of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest to logging and other development, removing protections for a temperate rainforest. Biden reversed the move.

68. He claimed to have built hundreds of miles of new border wall, but most of it was just repairs to existing sections.

69. Trump falsely claimed that the U.S. would lose its energy independence under Biden, even though the U.S. was energy independent before and after his presidency.

70. Trump hosted super-spreader events during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, which led to multiple outbreaks.

71. Trump tried to block the publication of a book by his niece, Mary Trump, which described his unfit mental state and corrupt behavior.

72. Trump repeatedly attacked the media, calling them the “enemy of the people” and undermining free speech.

73. Trump refused to condemn white supremacist groups like the Proud Boys, telling them instead to “stand back and stand by.”

74. Trump refused to release his tax returns, breaking decades of tradition and transparency.

75. Trump pressured foreign governments, including Ukraine, to investigate his political rivals, leading to his impeachment.

76. Trump mocked a reporter with a disability during a campaign rally, showing a lack of basic decency.

77. Trump refused to support measures to protect against Russian interference in U.S. elections.

78. Trump repeatedly violated the Hatch Act by using government resources for political purposes.

79. He ignored intelligence reports about Russian bounties on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

80. Trump’s administration rolled back environmental protections, contributing to climate change and pollution.

81. Trump lied that U.S. troops voted overwhelmingly for him, when military ballots showed otherwise.

82. Trump endorsed violence against protesters, saying “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

83. Trump withdrew from the World Health Organization during a global pandemic, weakening international cooperation.

84. Trump promoted unproven Covid-19 treatments like hydroxychloroquine, which endangered public health.

85. Trump repeatedly lied about his administration’s accomplishments, including jobs created and trade deals made.

86. Trump ordered the violent removal of peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square so he could stage a photo-op with a Bible.

87. Trump insulted John McCain, a decorated war hero, saying he prefers “people who weren’t captured.”

88. Trump downplayed the severity of climate change, reversing policies aimed at reducing carbon emissions.

89. Trump called for imprisoning political rivals, a hallmark of authoritarian regimes.

90. Trump’s reckless foreign policy decisions alienated key allies and damaged the U.S.’s reputation globally.

Our Burning World

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[Note: This post has been in development for a long time. I was inspired to finally post it when I finished Lopez’s essays, discussed below, and then by the tragedy that has unfolded in Maui. The devastation of Hawaii’s island gem is just the latest example of the fate that awaits us if global action is not taken promptly to combat climate change. We’ve seen it in California and many other places in the United States and the world over. Time is running out.]

Reading the accomplishments of author/environmentalist Barry Lopez, author of the National Book Award-winning masterpiece, Arctic Dreams, is more than enough to give anyone a deep sense of inadequacy. https://tinyurl.com/4wpfch3a I recently finished his posthumous collection of essays, aptly titled Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World (2022).  I was stunned to learn that Lopez had died on Christmas Day 2020, shortly after my wife and I moved back to the Washington DC area (in DC itself for the first time), after having survived the pandemic in New York City.

Lopez wrote Of Wolves and Men a decade earlier than Arctic Dreams. According to Wikipedia, “López is a surname of Spanish origin. It was originally a patronymic, meaning “Son of Lope”, Lope itself being a Spanish given name deriving from Latin lupus, meaning “wolf”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%B3pez This is an interesting juxtaposition in light of Lopez’s interest in natural history. Of Wolves and Men was a National Book Award finalist. Of that book, Amazon.com accurately says that it,

reveals the uneasy interaction between wolves and civilization over the centuries, and the wolf’s prominence in our thoughts about wild creatures. Drawing on an astonishing array of literature, history, science, and mythology as well as considerable personal experience with captive and free-ranging wolves, Lopez argues for the necessity of the wolf’s preservation and envelops the reader in its sensory world, creating a compelling picture of the wolf both as real animal and as imagined by man. A scientist might perceive the wolf as defined by research data, while an Eskimo hunter sees a family provider much like himself. For many Native Americans the wolf is also a spiritual symbol, a respected animal that can make both the individual and the community stronger. With irresistible charm and elegance, Of Wolves and Men celebrates scientific fieldwork, dispels folklore that has enabled the Western mind to demonize wolves, explains myths, and honors indigenous traditions,

Lopez’s profound ability to think deeply about everything he observed and to connect his observations to larger principles was amazing. And he did it with prose so powerful that you stop to reread sentences and whole paragraphs just to be sure you understood every insight he was recording. Here are a few examples from his 2019 memoir, Horizon:

It is here, with these attempts to separate the fate of the human world from that of the nonhuman world that we come face-to-face with a biological reality that halts us in our tracks: nature will be fine without us. Our question is no longer how to exploit the natural world for human comfort and gain, but how we can cooperate with one another to ensure we will someday have a fitting, not a dominating, place in it.

What cataclysm, I often wonder, or better, what act of imagination will it finally require, for us to be able to speak meaningfully with one another about our cultural fate and about our shared biological fate?

         ….

The desire to know ourselves better, to understand especially the source and the nature of our dread, looms before us now like a specter in a half-lit world, a weird dawn breaking over a scene of carnage: unbreathable air, human diasporas, the Sixth Extinction, ungovernable political mobs.

And this:

It might have been useful once to identify and denounce enemy cultures, those that were seen as ruthless and exploitive, obsessed with wealth and indifferent to social justice at the highest levels; but … I feel that this time has passed. People in every country today can identify with the very same threats to their lives and to the lives of their progeny. And many know their governments, elected or self-appointed, are too cowardly, too compromised, or too mean-spirited, to help them.

One of Lopez’s great gifts was the ability to view and understand situations through the eyes of multiple cultures. It was as if he had multiple minds in one body. Lopez, ever the brilliant storyteller, related the life of Ranald MacDonald, the product of a mixed marriage – a Chinook mother and a white father – who was born in 1824, a time when, not unlike today in some respects, being of “mixed blood” was a huge obstacle to advancement.

MacDonald traveled and had many jobs, coming to have a deep connection to the indigenous people of the Pacific and believing that the Japanese were related to American Indians. He also thought that Western industrialization was an imminent threat to Japan, that had been virtually sealed off for over a hundred years from Western contact. MacDonald managed to get to Japan and during a brief period of acceptance by the Japanese taught 14 members of the shogun’s court to speak English in the hope that it would help them deal with the Western merchants and military he believed, correctly, were soon coming to Japan. MacDonald died in relative obscurity, but Lopez gave a moving tribute to his life as one of the many people of talent and inspiration who was limited by racist and cultural biases throughout his life.

Then, there is Yuval Noah Harari, the author of Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind, that I have not read, and the sequel, Homo Deus, A Brief History of Tomorrow, that I am about to describe. As I understand it, the central story line of Sapiens was the emergence of humans as the dominant animal on the planet. These people are us — empowered by superior intelligence, opposable thumbs, tool-making ability, and all the rest — to reshape the earth in ways that were perceived as important to the survival and continued dominance of humankind over all other species on the planet. The supreme irony is that “homo sapiens” refers to the only surviving sub-tribe of Hominina and translates to “wise men.”Deus translates, of course, to “god” or “deity.” I will just leave that there. You get the idea.

Harari opens Homo Deus with the assertion that the primary historical scourges of mankind – famine, plague and war – have largely been conquered. As a result, he predicts man will now turn his main attentions to “a serious bid for immortality,” the arguably logical extension of the struggle against famine and disease. The first 70 pages of Homo Deus lay the foundation for what is to come. He argues that it was not the larger brains as such, with attendant superior (to other animals) intelligence, that enabled the planetary domination by humans. Instead, he says, it was the ability of homo sapiens to cooperate with strangers that was the key to it all.

Harari’s opening argument is obviously a very big idea and likely some people will take issue with it. So be it. The point is that these are “frontier concepts,” things most of us likely have not often thought about in depth but that have a lot to do with the future of our species. They were certainly subjects of little or no interest to Trump and his cabinet of policy makers and grifters. But Harari has thought about these issues profoundly. I won’t be around to see if he’s right but I am powerfully interested in understanding his provocative thinking.

His writing will not appeal to evangelical Christians or others similarly inclined. Harari leaves no doubt that he does not believe in the existence of souls, human or otherwise, pointing to, among other things, the absence of evidence. Above all else, Harari, a historian by trade, is an evidence guy. If no evidence appears after extensive investigation, the “thing” most likely does not exist and never did. Me too.

There is another aspect to this, one that I have touched on before. See, for example, the post entitled The Larger Meaning of “Hidden Figures.”  https://shiningseausa.com/?s=hidden+figures  We have in these two people – Lopez and Harari — examples of humans who, in slightly different circumstances, might well have been ostracized and prevented from reaching their potential as students and later as teachers for the rest of us. Lopez was as American as apple pie, but he bore a family name of Spanish origin. It is not hard to imagine that the Trump administration saw him as a target, because of his name and because he was a truth-teller who wrote and lectured about environmental policies that are anathema to Trump and the Republican Party. Imagine what will happen if Trump, armed with years of new grievances, regains power.

Harari is an even easier target. He was born and grew up in a secular Jewish family with Lebanese and Eastern European roots. That might not have been a problem for the Trump administration, given its attachment to the right-wing leadership of Israel, but there is more: Harari is openly gay and married to a man (in a civil ceremony in Toronto – those Canadians again!). They live in a kind of cooperative agricultural community of individual farms, some might call it a commune. Or socialism! OMG! People working together for the common good. Outrageous.

Reading the challenging and awe-inspiring ideas of these two people, I am reminded yet again of all the other “non-white” men and women whose race-based suppression has deprived all of us of the untold benefits of people capable of seeing things more deeply and thinking in frontier concepts that open our minds to new possibilities.

And to what end? What coherent mental process leads people like Stephen Miller and Donald Trump to the conclusion that some people, solely because of their ethnic heritage, are a danger to American society and should be removed from it? How does Miller rationalize his strident opposition to immigration in light of his mother’s Jewish parents having come here from Belarus in 1903?

We will never know but the point is that suppression of the “other” risks the loss for everyone of life-enhancing contributions to the improvement of society. We will never be able to “know” what we have lost, but it is certain that the loss has happened and continues. If, as is often speculated, this suppression is based on fear of displacement by the unknown, the leaders of the suppression should look at what is known. THAT is what they should be afraid of, the “scene of carnage” described by Lopez.

Some of Lopez’s last words in print are compelling:

Evidence of the failure to love is everywhere around us. To contemplate what it is to love today brings us up against reefs of darkness and walls of despair. If we are to manage the havoc – ocean acidification, corporate malfeasance and government corruption, endless war – we have to reimagine what it means to live lives that matter, or we will only continue to push on with the unwarranted hope that things will work out. We need to step into a deeper conversation about enchantment and agape, and to actively explore a greater capacity to love other humans. The old ideas – the crushing immorality of maintaining the nation-state, the life destroying belief that to care for others is to be weak and that to be generous is foolish – can have no future with us….

Only an ignoramus can imagine now that pollinating insects, migratory birds, and pelagic fish can depart our company and that we will survive because we know how to make tools. Only the misled can insist that heaven awaits the righteous while they watch the fires on Earth consume the only heaven we have ever known….

In this trembling moment, with light armor under several flags rolling across northern Syria, with civilians beaten to death in the streets of Occupied Palestine, with fires roaring across the vineyards of California and forests being felled to ensure more space for development, with student loans from profiteers breaking the backs of the young, and with Niagaras of water falling into the oceans from every sector of Greenland, in this moment, is it still possible to face the gathering darkness and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?….

Change is coming fast, though, on multiple fronts. Most of us begin the day now uncertain of exactly where we are. Once, we banked on knowing how to respond to all the important questions. Once, we assumed we’d be able to pass on to the next generation the skill of staying poised in worrying times. To survive what’s headed our way – global climate disruption, a new pandemic, additional authoritarian governments – and to endure, we will have to stretch our imaginations. We will need to trust each other, because today, it’s as if every safe place has melted into the sameness of water. We are searching for the boats we forgot to build.

Rest in peace, Barry Lopez.

Trump Wants Your Children & Grandchildren Dead

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If you haven’t read a dystopian novel about the future of the world following a nuclear holocaust, an encounter with a large asteroid or, more realistically, the playing out of anti-science climate change denial, you should. Particularly the ones about environmental collapse. They’re more “fun” than actual science books, easier to absorb and sometimes have happy endings. They often focus on a small band of “survivors” who miraculously are able, through ingenuity and just good luck, to eke out a “living” sometimes in violent conflict with other bands in similar dire circumstances.

Someday soon these dystopian visions of possible futures will begin to show up in the History section of your local bookstore or online purchasing habit. These visions are coming to pass as I write. If you don’t believe this, read The Sixth Extinction, just for starters. It won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2015. That’s nonfiction. Published before Trump was on the radar. It’s about the science. It’s about the impending disaster that, once it overtakes the planet, may be irreversible.

Trump, of course, is now on the radar, as are the Republican Party enablers who have chosen to support his agenda without regard for the consequences for humanity. Trump himself is, by his own admission, not a reader. Experience teaches us he is not a thinker either. He, of course, regards himself as a distinctly superior being, smarter than all the scientists who are close to unanimous in the belief that climate change is real and is the result, in large part, of human activity. The evidence that that view is overwhelming. Republicans wishing it were otherwise doesn’t change the reality. As Ben Franklin presciently said a long time ago: Experience keeps a dear school, but a fool will learn in no other.

Can so many people – the climate change deniers – be that uninformed or downright stupid? Of course, they can. They are people for whom evidence, especially if the least bit complicated or inconvenient, is not important. As proof, I refer you to the data, easily found online, of the number of people who believe that the earth is regularly visited by extra-terrestrial beings and the people who think the earth is flat, or believe that the moon landing was a faked Hollywood production, and on and on. Read any history book worthy of the name and you’ll see the story of mass belief in false ideas for which there was plenty of contradictory evidence or, often, simply no evidence to support the mass delusion. People believe what they believe.

So, to return to the subject at hand, Donald Trump heads the Executive Branch of the U.S. government and as a result has enormous power. He appoints, and his Republican majority in the Senate routinely confirms, unqualified true believers to head agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department. Their intention, manifested regularly, is to undermine the environmental protections that have been woven into the national fabric beginning many decades ago at the behest of, among others, some Republican presidents. But those Republicans of yesteryear were quite different than those now serving Donald Trump.

You may have known people like these back in high school. Not high achievers, they were often in trouble, seemed determinedly uninterested in learning much new and were proudest of their record of disciplinary malfeasance. They were almost exclusively white males and often came from families with resources. Eventually they ended up in business and were successful in the sense that they made some money. Trump likes such people even if, as is almost always the case in his appointments, they don’t actually have a record of achievement in the fields in which they now exercise enormous influence. They inspired low expectations in their learning ability and were successful by adhering closely to chichés about the free market economy, American exceptionalism and its importance to the very essence of American society.

So, Trump continues on his merry way, undermining the Endangered Species Act (see New York Times editorial, Sunday, August 18, 2019), the Clean Power Plan and endless other environmental protections that have helped clear the air, purify the water and generally support the health and welfare of the people. Just like in high school, Trump and his lackeys are not really interested in understanding the implications of what they’re doing. They have a short-term view –to make it easy on business to exploit the planet so some people can make more money and retain their popularity among the UFO-sighting crowd.

One thing about those dystopian books I mentioned earlier – in most cases, money no longer means much. There is usually little or nothing to buy. In those stories, all portents of our future, we’re back to bartering and stealing and killing to survive. So much for short term thinking.

I did not exaggerate when I titled this post that Trump wants to kill your descendants. Look at it this way – if I point a loaded gun at you and squeeze the trigger, resulting in grievous bodily harm to you, the law will say that I “intended” to harm you because of the foreseeable outcome that my actions through a chain of causation (pointing and squeezing the trigger of a loaded gun) would have. Trump’s environmental policies, pursued in the face of overwhelming evidence of egregious harm to the planet that sustains us, are exactly like that loaded gun – pointed at all of us and likely to hit your children and grandchildren in the near future.

Many of us have become passive about these issues because we have been primed to believe in good outcomes. Most of our stories, no matter how gruesome in the telling, end with victory for the good guys. War movies, serial killer novels, you name it. We have been conditioned to believe that somehow the worst outcomes will be avoided, that the good will prevail over evil and all will be well in the end, perhaps after an intervening period of inconvenience but certainly not the end of the world as we know it.

That conditioning is hard to overcome and is a particularly strong force in the thinking and emotional makeup of people for whom one or two issues drive all of their motivation. I refer to evangelicals who are obsessed with abortion and who will support someone like Trump because they believe he is opposed to abortion. They will overlook every other aspect of Trump’s behavior to achieve the one goal they think is most important. How these people will react when the earth’s temperature rises, say 4 or 5 degrees, remains to be seen but history suggests they will die believing they did the right thing.  The same is true for those Americans for whom keeping immigrants out of the United States is the single most important national policy. They may strangle on the poisoned air and water in the years to come, certainly their children will, but, by God, America will have been preserved for white people and thus they will feel vindicated and victorious even as they perish in massive numbers.

The conditioning we all have been subjected to makes it hard to accept that the end of the earth as we know it may be imminent. Not tomorrow, but soon. In the lifetimes of your children and grandchildren who are alive today. Reality is hard to accept when alternative stories of victory over evil in the end are so ubiquitous and so satisfying. But those are just stories. Reality is quite different. Sure, we defeated Germany in World War II but millions died in the concentration camps. To avoid the massive casualties predicted for an invasion of the Japanese homeland, we dropped the first two atomic bombs on civilian populations of two relatively small towns. The plan worked but likely hundreds of thousands suffered and died. So, victory has its price. Always.

Trump’s ignorance and the indifference of his enablers represent the greatest threat to humanity in possibly centuries. The United States is generally recognized as the most powerful and successful economy and society in the world by many standards. Because of that, its impact on the world is magnified. And it has elected leadership that has a singular vision with only one possible outcome.

After much indecision, I have come to the conclusion that the danger to the country and the world from Trump’s continuing as president is simply too great. He should be removed from office as quickly as possible. I understand all the political arguments, that the Republicans control the Senate and will never vote to remove him no matter what the evidence shows, but part of the process of rebuilding the American society requires that all the evidence be marshaled and shown to the public and the world. Even if the effort fails, it will help drive the voting public to overcome its conditioning and take action in the 2020 election to rid the country of this foul curse.

 

Get the Popcorn Ready for July 2

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Ars Technica reports (https://bit.ly/2kRp1y9) that a federal judge has ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to provide documents on which Scott Pruitt, the Administrator of the agency, relied in stating, in March 2017, that carbon dioxide was not a major contributor to climate change. See https://bit.ly/2JowYWp Immediately after Pruitt’s statement, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) filed a Freedom of Information Act request for documents on which Pruitt relied in his conclusion which conflicts with the overwhelming consensus of scientific thought on the subject, including statements published by EPA itself before Pruitt assumed his position.

According to the Ars Technica report, the EPA refused the FOIA request and PEER sued the agency. On June 1, Beryl A. Howell, Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued a 19-page opinion ordering EPA to produce the documents by July 2 or explain why they can’t by July 11. https://bit.ly/2Jleztq

The opinion opens by observing that EPA’s own webpage contradicted Pruitt’s statement, yet “EPA has performed no search for and produced no records in response to the plaintiff’s FOIA request.” EPA stalled for over a year.

The judge would have none of EPA dissembling and stumbling attempts to shield the Administrator and avoid justifying the statements he made:

“Particularly troubling is the apparent premise of this agency challenge to the FOIA request, namely: that the evidentiary basis for a policy or factual statement by an agency head, including about the scientific factors contributing to climate change, is inherently unknowable. Such a premise runs directly counter to “an axiom of administrative law that an agency’s explanation of the basis for its decision must include ‘a rational connection between the facts found and the choice made,’” [case citations omitted] EPA’s strained attempt to raise an epistemological smokescreen will not work here to evade its obligations under the FOIA. [Opinion at 10]

In a major case of understatement, typical of judicial opinions, Judge Howell said:

“At the outset, EPA’s apparent concern about taking a position on climate change is puzzling since EPA has already taken a public position on the causes of climate change. The D.C. Circuit described as “substantial” the “body of scientific evidence marshaled by EPA,” which “scientific evidence of record included support for the proposition that greenhouse gases trap heat on earth that would otherwise dissipate into space; that this ‘greenhouse effect’ warms the climate; that human activity is contributing to increased atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases; and that the climate system is warming.”  [citations omitted]

And,

“EPA is construing the second part of the FOIA request far more broadly than the text supports in a thinly veiled effort to make the request more complex and burdensome than it is.”

And, finally,

“EPA has failed to demonstrate a viable legal basis for its refusal to conduct any search whatsoever in response to the plaintiff’s straightforward FOIA request. When the head of an agency makes a public statement that appears to contradict “the published research and conclusions of” that agency, Compl. ¶ 20, the FOIA provides a valuable tool for citizens to demand agency records providing any support, scientific or otherwise, for the pronouncement, and to oblige agencies to search for and produce any non-exempt responsive records. Compliance with such a request “would help ‘ensure an informed citizenry, vital to the functioning of a democratic society.’”

If the EPA had devoted the time spent resisting the FOIA request on actually complying with it, the agency would have been finished with this matter long ago. Now the agency has been ordered to finish the search in a month and report shortly thereafter on remaining issues.

I cannot avoid the conclusion that the professional agency staff at EPA knows that the documents sought to support the Administrator’s claims re climate change simply don’t exist. They are doing what they can to protect Pruitt from himself, but Chief Judge Howell has seen through the smokescreen. Pruitt has no meaningful science or internal agency research to support his right-wing political position that, as his President and enabler Donald Trump would put it, “climate change is a hoax.” So, July 2, assuming EPA does not continue to resist by appealing to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, will be an interesting day of reckoning.

EPA Docket on Re-Evaluating Regulations Is Open Through Monday

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The Environmental Protection Agency docket in which the agency will carry out Executive Order 13777, “Enforcing the Regulatory Reform Agenda,” is open through the end of Monday, May 15. To file comments, go to: https://www.regulations.gov/document?D=EPA-HQ-OA-2017-0190-0042. It is a simple process. As of this writing, 50,557 comments have been filed. You can see them by clicking on the Open Docket Folder link. Most are very short and filed anonymously. One of the reasons for the anonymity is that the online comment forms do not expressly ask for identification. They used to do this routinely but not in this case.

In any event, I have not read all of the comments, obviously, but it’s a fair guess that the vast majority are from individuals arguing that the environmental regulations were adopted for good and sufficient reasons to protect the air we breathe and the water we drink and the ecosystem on which life on the Earth depends for its diversity and survival. Whether these comments will have any influence remains to be seen, but it is certain that if the people do not speak up, the Trump administration is simply going to roll over us.

Here is the comment I filed, shorter than I’d like but time constraints being what they are, this is all I could do. If you are inclined to file, feel free to echo my thoughts. It would be best not to simple repeat them, however, as EPA will ignore anything it believes is a “mass mailing” input. Or just read a few of the other public comments and say what you believe. Let’s not let the administration eviscerate the environment without putting up some resistance. Here is what I filed:

“This process is designed to fulfill a political agenda rather than being a science-based re-evaluation of regulations that have had some demonstrable unintended effects. It is therefore a misguided exercise. Undoing environmental regulations that were adopted after notice and hearing under the Administrative Procedure Act requires similar procedural processes and safeguards, including cost benefit analyses published for public evaluation and input before action is proposed and again after specific actions are proposed with stated rationales and science-based evidence. Any program designed to change regulations that is based on denial of the reality of climate change is inherently defective and may not serve as a lawful basis for altering existing environmental regulations.”

A Wall of Willful Ignorance: Suggested Reading for President-Elect Trump

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Because of its familiarity and ease of access, I am using Wikipedia to introduce this piece; it also covers the salient aspects:

“The tragedy of the commons is an economic theory of a situation within a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting that resource through their collective action.”

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Among many other earthly assets, the air and water, critical to advanced life on earth, are “commons” and are subject to the problem of the tragedy of the commons. I don’t know whether Donald Trump and his “infatuants” (forgive me) dispute the established scientific fact that the earth is warmer than at any time in human history, and well beyond, but I do know that they dispute that human activity contributes materially to the climate-change problem. This despite the overwhelming worldwide scientific consensus that human activity has fundamentally altered the environment and made the Earth threateningly warmer.

How can one deal with this when there is such strong dispute? I suggest that Mr. Trump should undertake a risk analysis. He should be familiar with this, since every real estate investment he has made must have involved such an analysis at some point. It’s pretty straightforward. Evaluate the risk against the consequences – weigh the costs, but more than just out-of-pocket costs, of ignoring the scientific consensus versus the risk and consequences of accepting, and acting upon, the scientific consensus.

If we ignore climate change and are wrong, it likely is the end of life as we know it and perhaps the end of all life other than some subterranean worm-like life forms. If, however we assume that scientists are right, we have chance to save our ecosystem by changing how we do business and how we live. This course of action will create many new, but different, jobs than in past. If this turns out to have been unnecessary, we are no worse off and likely are better off as beneficiaries of cleaner air and water, among other things.

On the other hand, the price of being wrong on this issue is simply too high to continue insisting that it is a “hoax” and that addressing it will be bad for the economy. Not addressing it could be (almost certainly will be) catastrophically bad for the economy and everything else. Risk analysis argues strongly for urgent changes in the way humans operate.

It was revealed during the campaigns that President-Elect Trump is not an avid reader. Indeed, he indicated he really didn’t care to read much at all. He boasted that he was very smart and got his information elsewhere, apparently through the Internet. This is unfortunate for many reasons, not the least of which is that it deprives him of information and modes of thinking about complex issues that have been studied by others, often for many years and often submitted to critical review by accomplished people in the fields of study. Without the benefit of readily available expertise and the propensity to rely on the views of inner-circle ideologues, the President threatens to become an unguided missile able to deliver mega-tonnage blows to the prevailing order that has existed for years and decades, or in the case of the environment, for centuries.

Even a brief look back at the effects of the Industrial Revolution would teach a reasonably coherent mind that uncontrolled industry is harmful to the environment, often in ways that take decades or longer to correct after remedial measures are begun. We likely do not have that luxury anymore because of the global impact of human activity.

Trump is the elected President of the United States. To steal a phrase from an old Willie Nelson song, there’s nothing we can do about it now. All of our lives are, in a very real sense, in his hands. I therefore propose to him, and such of his advisors who may be open to other points of view, a short list of books and articles that will educate him and his staff on a few topics of transcendent importance to the country and the world, starting with the environment.

I urge readers of this blog to send me your own examples. I will endeavor to incorporate them into a single message to the new keepers of the White House. I don’t know how to do that just yet because a wall of willful ignorance is harder to scale than the concrete border wall that the President-Elect claimed to be one of his top priorities. Beyond the “wall,” however, are a wide-ranging set of objectives that pose an existential threat to our environment and to the survival of many threatened species of animals and other life forms. The ultimate effects of losing these parts of the food chain are unknown and, therefore, killing off the threatened species may have effects that cannot be reversed and that could threaten our very existence.

I refer you here to a story by Julie Pace of Associated Press, published in http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/oil-billionaire-considered-lead-energy-department/:

“The Trump to-do list targets recent Obama administration efforts to reduce air and water pollution that have been opposed by Republicans and industries that profit from the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, including the “waters of the United States” rule and ozone regulations.

Trump calls climate change a “hoax” perpetrated by China and others and has said he will rescind the Clean Power Plan — the linchpin of President Barack Obama’s strategy to fight climate change.

A coalition of conservative states has challenged the Clean Power Plan and also has challenged an EPA rule that expanded the definition of waters protected under the Clean Water Act to smaller non-navigable waters and seasonal tributaries.

The Obama administration says the rule would safeguard drinking water for 117 million people, but Republicans and some Democrats representing rural areas say the regulations are costly, confusing and amount to a government power grab. Federal courts have put the rules on hold as judges review lawsuits.

On his campaign website, Trump called for rescinding “all job-destroying Obama executive actions” and has vowed to unleash an American energy revolution, allowing unfettered production of oil, coal and natural gas. He would sharply increase oil and gas drilling on federal lands and open up offshore drilling in the Atlantic Ocean and other areas where it is blocked……

In addition to repealing the power plant rules, the transition document also says Trump’s energy team is considering modifications to Obama’s ozone rule, which is meant to reduce smog.

Also on the chopping block are Obama administration regulations intended to limit harmful emissions and chemical-laden waste water from hydraulic fracturing operations at oil and gas wells.”

Since the survival of the planet is of the highest importance, the first items on my list are two related books by the same author, addressing the threats to the biosphere:

The Meaning of Human Existence by Edward O. Wilson, a National Book Award Finalist in 2014

Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, 2016. Edward O. Wilson won the Pulitzer Prize twice.

Then: The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, Elizabeth Kolbert, 2014, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015.

Trump’s people should look at the recently published The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War, by Robert J. Gordon, a distinguished professor at Northwestern University. Gordon was included on the Bloomberg 2013 list of the most influential thinkers in America. The book is a data-rich tracing of the forces that shaped America’s economic growth from the end of the Civil War until now and beyond. Just the first 200 pages will make clear the catastrophic consequences of allowing free market forces to rule unchecked over the production and distribution of food and medicine. Before Trump puts in place a hiring freeze on government workers and the Republican Congress slashes agency budgets, someone had better give some deep thought to the impact on the health of the American people.

Moving on to labor and jobs, it is not clear that Trump or his senior advisors are aware how labor unions emerged as a force in America, and how corporate America reacted to workers’ efforts to get protection for themselves and their children from abusive working conditions. Nor do they seem to be aware that trying to restore dirty energy (mainly coal) to its former place of prominence flies in the face of irreversible global forces of technological change that have been at work since before the Great Depression. It is an illusion that the American economy can be massively stimulated by restoring the old ways of doing work. Those who believed Trump’s promises made to Rust Belt workers and voted Trump into leadership of the Free World are going to be massively disappointed.

There are two books I am referencing. One is From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend from 2001. The back cover sums it up: “… the historic efforts of working people to win the rights we take for granted today: basic health and safety standards in the workplace, fair on-the-job treatment for men and women, the minimum wage, and even the weekend itself.” Yes, even the weekend itself. These features of modern life were once not provided to most working people.

The other work that would provide an even broader education is Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945, David M. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize winning history published in 1999. The first few chapters may pique the interest of Trump’s advisors who are not mentally blocked to new information that powerfully shows how and why our society and government are structured as they are. Anyone who believes the country’s problems are new products of the Democratic presidency of the past eight years and can be solved by simply unleashing the “free market” are in for a rude awakening.

If they don’t wake up soon, everyone will suffer the most frightful consequences. Completely free markets ignore the Tragedy of the Commons and will create a problem that mankind will not likely be able to resolve by letting businessmen do what they like. And when rising seas encroach on coastal cities, increasingly severe winter storms crush entire states and unprecedented heat waves leave people gasping for relief, the people who only act when there is a profit to be made will be too little too late and too irrelevant.