Under Trump the United States has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accords. This aligns with his aims to “unleash America’s energy”. Trump’s energy policy seeks to free us “from burdensome and ideologically motivated regulations”, which translates to any environmental policy or practice that acknowledges the perils of climate change and the negative impact human “progress” has on the environment.
This executive order abolished the American Climate Corps, which was a program implemented under Biden to support clean energy development and fight climate change. This executive order also calls for the weakening of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970, which in essence holds entities accountable for their environmental impact. This order also disbanded The Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases.
This executive order and the policies lying therein have the potential to do great harm to the animals, wildlife, natural spaces, and humans of the United States. This plan is shortsighted and greedy. Excess use of natural resources is not sustainable. I hate the term “natural resources”. It makes nature sound like a commodity. Nature is not a commodity and humans are not separate from nature. We are nature. What happens to the planet, happens to us as well.
Trump doesn’t care if the national parks are destroyed or if factories dump toxic waste into our waters. He’s going to be safely tucked away at Mar-a-Lago where none of the fallout of environmental disaster will touch him or anyone he knows. Bottom line - I greatly fear that this executive order indicates a dangerous disregard for the environment on the part of President Trump. I worry that there will be long lasting and probably irreversible consequences to policies implemented under this order.
I wonder whether President Trump has ever visited national parks, gone camping, or gone for long hikes in nature. He does seem to love the outdoors, as he is an avid golfer. At least two of his sons seem to enjoy hunting, and sometimes hunters are very interested in wildlife and nature conservation.
My problem with the current President relates to his lack of curiosity or self-awareness. A person with wisdom, who is intellectually curious and has some degree of insight into internal motivations and biases, is likely to seek out an accurate understanding of reality. I’ve been acutely interested in climate change ever since I happened upon the “hockey stick” article while browsing through Geophysical Research Letters in a university library back in 1997. I’ve followed critiques of “alarmism” and the works of persons who doubted the severity and swiftness of global warming, and the work of the scientists who warn that things are very bad and threaten humanity’s future. I can remember the climate forecasts that were being made in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and I can look at recent climate news from the past decade, and the models of 25 years ago have been fairly accurate. The critiques of the climate warming models have also been mostly answered. There really isn’t much room for doubt now, and we can be highly confident that human release of greenhouse gasses (and feedback effects related to methane release from natural sources in response to melting permafrost and warming lakes) are rapidly raising global temperatures, and raising sea levels.
The prognosis for humanity isn’t good. Long stretches of extremely high temperatures coupled with high humidity will make some parts of the planet practically uninhabitable for months of each year, except for persons who can shelter in air-conditioned spaces. Increases in number and severity of storms with rain and wind are likely, but in other areas droughts may become more severe and longer. Look at Table 1 on pages 10-12 of the UK Climate Change Risk Assessment of 2022, or the Fifth National Climate Assessment for the USA from 2023. And the USA and the UK are fairly protected from many of the worst changes. Global assessments of risk show that the Central Sahel, and low-lying lands near coasts in areas regularly hit by tropical storms (places like Bangladesh, islands of the Caribbean or Western Pacific, Thailand, Vietnam, Florida and the American Gulf Coast) are especially vulnerable.
It seems a damning indictment of our species that political leaders across the world can just shrug their shoulder and go on encouraging economic activity that increases our output of greenhouse gasses. Russia encourages the use of fossil fuels, and China builds many new coal-fired power plants. As you’ve pointed out, the USA has withdrawn from efforts to reduce greenhouse gasses.
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