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Change Trump can believe?
Photo: David McNew / Getty Images
Last month, the Trump administration released a report that global temperatures would be four degrees higher by the end of the century, assuming current trends persist. World leaders have pledged to prevent global temperatures from rising two degrees (Celsius) above pre-industrial levels, knowing that a warming beyond that could be catastrophic. The last time the Earth was as hot as the White House expects it to be in 2100, its oceans are hundreds of feet high. That is to say, the Trump administration officially expects that, in the absence of radical action to reduce carbon emissions, much of Manhattan and Miami is sinking into the oceans; many coral reefs will be irreversibly destroyed by ocean acidification; vast areas of the Earth will lose their main sources of water; and a variety of extreme weather events will dramatically increase in frequency.
And the White House believes that this fact is an argument for easing restrictions on carbon emissions.
The report revealing the administration's forecasts for global warming was not a memo specifying President Trump's intention to return to the Paris Climate Agreement or to appoint Naomi Klein as director of the EPA. It was an environmental impact statement that justified its decision to repeal the federal energy efficiency standards for vehicles built after 2020 that were previously planned – a deregulation measure that would add an additional 8 billion tonnes of dioxide carbon to the atmosphere by the end of the century, according to the government's own estimates.
Like the Washington To post On Friday, the administration uses its 4-degree warming estimate to say that eliminating 8 billion tonnes of emissions will not be enough to change the climate outlook, so the federal government should not worry.
After all, the world should make huge emission reductions to avoid catastrophic warming – which "would require substantial increases in technological innovation and adoption from current levels, as well as the economy and economy. the fleet of fossil fuel vehicles, which is currently neither technologically feasible nor economically feasible. "
This argument is deplorable in its nihilism. But his basic assumption is also obviously absurd. The analysis of the administration is based on the idea that there is no relationship between what the United States does in terms of climate regulation and what other countries in the world do. This is totally wrong: not only can the United States give the example, but they also have the power to compel other countries to emulate the carbon standards we have set ourselves. As Trump likes to point out in other contexts, America is the largest economic and military power in the world and has considerable weight on foreign governments. Earlier this year, the White House forced European companies to suddenly suspend their relations with Iran – without any consistent reason – simply by threatening to deny them access to the US banking system. If the Trump administration decided to make the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions the No. 1 objective of its foreign policy – which is about the only rational priority, if it sincerely believed that the fact of not reducing emissions would drown US coastal cities – it could then make sure that our nation's carbon regulations would be adopted by others (and thus would have multiplier effects).
Of course, what the "Trump Administration" sincerely believes is unclear. In all appearances, Donald Trump believes that climate change is perhaps a "Chinese hoax", while some evangelicals of the administration seem to welcome it as a sign of the haste of the eschaton. Climate change is real – but inevitable – so let's live just for the moment. It was the work of some NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) poor bureaucrats to invent a rational argument for a policy rooted in greed and vexation.
That said, if we assume that all Republican party leaders have concluded that human civilization will not survive Barron Trump, their agenda of government begins to make much more sense. Exacerbating inequalities and subordinating municipalities to profit maximization in the short term is not in the mid-term enlightened interest of the GOP's donor class – but in the medium term we will all (apparently) be dead!
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