The soul-killing damage that a minority of voting Americans in 2016 brought about to this nation’s culture, its institutions, its laws and its strategic and moral standing in the world is already visible to anyone who cares to look. But the most harmful and far-reaching legacy of Donald Trump’s tenure of despoiling the office of president may go relatively unrecognized for years, as atmospheric and water temperatures worldwide continue their steady and inexorable rise, thanks in large part to the shortsighted policies and wholesale U.S. abandonment of responsibility or leadership in the area of climate change.
As pointed out by the New York Times, this purposeful abandonment of science owes itself more to the paranoia and insecurity of Donald Trump himself, rather than any coherent ideology.
He came into office viewing agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency as bastions of what he calls the “deep state,” and his contempt for their past work on the issue is an animating factor in trying to force them to abandon key aspects of the methodology they use to try to understand the causes and consequences of a dangerously warming planet.
In his attempt to eradicate the progress and policies intended to reduce the impending scourge of global warming made by his predecessor, this “anti-science” imperative Trump has encouraged, an attitude running rampant and unchallenged through all of Trump’s executive federal agencies, is stunning if only for its deliberate, heedless irrationality.
It’s an insane, suicidal temper tantrum, without any basis or cause, that is being maliciously inflicted on all of us, our children, and our children’s children. And the next few months promise more of the same, but with an additional, grotesque element as the administration’s “endgame” comes into view.
In the next few months, the White House will complete the rollback of the most significant federal effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, initiated during the Obama administration. It will expand its efforts to impose Mr. Trump’s hard-line views on other nations, building on his retreat from the Paris accord and his recent refusal to sign a communiqué to protect the rapidly melting Arctic region unless it was stripped of any references to climate change.
And, in what could be Mr. Trump’s most consequential action yet, his administration will seek to undermine the very science on which climate change policy rests.
Because the evidence and scientific data clearly showing the climatic devastation facing humanity is overwhelming and irrefutable, the Trump administration has rushed to re-define the scope of the parameters used to predict it.
The U.S. Geological Survey, for example, led by Trump appointee James Reilly, recently revised all climate models prepared by the USGS to deliberately exclude projections beyond the year 2040, when the most pronounced and drastic effects of global warming will be felt. This is the effective equivalent of placing a blindfold over the eyes of those responsible for determining that department’s strategic planning.
Similarly, in its rush to “redefine” science in accordance with the preferences of the fossil fuel industry, which bears in large part the primary responsibility for the exacerbation of climate change, the administration has ordered that the National Climate Assessment report, prepared every four years, omit any references or analysis relating to the long term impacts expected from climate change, i.e., those which will occur when things start to get really, really bad, towards the middle of the century.
“What we have here is a pretty blatant attempt to politicize the science — to push the science in a direction that’s consistent with their politics,” said Philip B. Duffy, the president of the Woods Hole Research Center, who served on a National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed the government’s most recent National Climate Assessment. “It reminds me of the Soviet Union.”
But this effort to alter climate science methodology is only the beginning. The administration is now preparing to deploy a blanket propaganda campaign to denounce the consensus of the scientific community as a whole. For this, they have enlisted a 79-year-old physicist and ardent climate denialist named William Happer to oversee the creation of a “climate review panel,” the sole existence of which is to find ways to “debunk” established scientific conclusions regarding the impact and causes of climate change. In other words, a biased advisory body within our government, paid for by our tax dollars, created purely to justify Trump’s inaction and the continuation of his fossil-fuel friendly policies.
As the Times reports, Happer’s promotion and his entree into the Trump administration was facilitated by right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer, who, like Charles and David Koch, has bankrolled entire networks of fake “think-tanks” and organizations dedicated to raising “doubt” about the impact of man-made climate change.
Happer, a colleague of like-minded right-wing fanatic John Bolton at the National Security Council (where he now serves as “deputy assistant for emerging technologies”) just this past week compared the treatment of carbon dioxide to Hitler’s treatment of the Jewish people during the Holocaust.
Happer is not a climatologist. But his pedigree as a Princeton professor “emeritus” has made him a favorite among the fossil fuel industry who have effectively bankrolled and promoted his professional consulting life. This is why in spite of his outlier status as a veritable “crank” among legitimate climate scientists he has achieved the reputation as one of the primary go-to consultants for the denial industry.
But the ultimate intent of these measures is not simply to spread phony propaganda. Trump's efforts to roll back Obama-era regulations have run into opposition by environmental organizations who use the administration's own reports to refute claims made by industry lawyers. So if those reports can be distorted by selective manipulation by an “official government” body, the likelihood increases that an incurious and reactionary federal judge (and there are many more of those than there were two years ago) will deem them authoritative and defer to them as legitimate justifications for the administration’s policies.
That’s how the process of deceiving the public works. Because as long as there is more money to be made by burning fossil fuels, even at the cost of the future of the human race, the history is clear that the oil, coal and gas conglomerates, the billionaires who own them, and their stable of pseudo-science enablers will not hesitate to use whatever power and leverage they have, be it fake science or otherwise, to achieve their ends.
And in spite of the catastrophic consequences, we will all suffer because of their greed, Donald Trump has given these people the complete run of our government.
For a thorough analysis of these new administration policies, see this post by Mark Sumner.