Tag Archives: climate change

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.