Trump’s future-be-damned climate change policy
As a journalist, I go back a long way in writing about global warming, although rumors that I covered the end of the Ice Age are exaggerated. In the late 1980s, or maybe it was the early 1980s, I interviewed an environmental lobbyist about the politics of the “greenhouse effect,” which was what we used to call climate change. In my innocent youth, or maybe early middle age, I found it hard to understand the reluctance of the Reagan administration to address, or even acknowledge, this threat to the global ecosystem.
“Well,” the lobbyist replied with a shrug, “the rule is you dance with who brung ya” — meaning officials who owed their positions to support from the fossil fuel industry were not about to turn against their patrons merely out of concern for the future of life on earth.
“I was shocked when I saw this,” said David Pettit, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “I thought, wait, they’re putting this out? This is the administration, it’s not some aging hippie in Santa Monica.”
By NHTSA’s calculations, the net effect of the Obama plan would provide at best a marginal benefit for the climate, amounting to a small fraction of a degree, compared to the Trump administration’s preferred approach, which is to do nothing. Meeting the Obama standards “would require substantial increases in technology innovation and adoption compared to today’s levels and would require the economy and the vehicle fleet to move away from the use of fossil fuels, which is not currently technologically feasible or economically feasible,” the statement says.
“They made some assumptions to make the number come out where they wanted,” Pettit told me. “They wanted to show their proposal won’t make any significant difference. They got to the number they attribute to the Obama rules by a crazy assumption that after 2021 nobody does anything else to fight global warming. That gets you to the 7 degrees.”
Also, some of those people probably have children too.
Of course, nihilism is opposed to Christianity, but I suspect that even the evangelical hucksters who cluster around Trump realize that he is a pagan at heart.
But Trump, as we know, has children, and grandchildren who could well be alive into the next century. Does he think about them at all? To even ask the question is to answer it. I am of the same generation as Trump, and if I outlive him it probably won’t be for too many years. If I had to think of one thing he has done for me, it’s to give me a reason to be glad I’m old.
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