WORLDFIRE - Chapter 9, Part V

Climate of Denial

In Chapter 9, “Climate of Denial,” we will be exploring various expressions of climate denial: 1) Fossil Fuel Industry Denial, 2) Republican Party Denial, 3) Democratic Party Denial, 4) Barack Obama’s Denial (included because he was president during my 2010 ride), 5) Donald Trump’s Denial, 6) Joe Biden’s Denial, and 7) Distraction as Denial. I have made every effort to be nonpartisan in my analysis. I hope you’ll stick with me through all seven parts - irrespective of your political views - as we objectively explore how best to dismantle these forms of destructive denial. Thank you.

Donald Trump’s Denial

The 2016 election gave us bigger problems than a president who refused to lead. It gave us a president who refused to believe. The GOP’s partisan war on science found its loudest propaganda mouthpiece in President Donald J. Trump. Upon assuming office, America’s climate-denier-in-chief not only worked overtime to undo the meager climate initiatives Obama had enacted; he was determined to send us back to the Dark Ages of unregulated fossil fuel pollution. Under President Trump, U.S. oil production soared to levels eclipsing even Obama’s record levels.

You may recall that in the summer of 2017, in what history will undoubtedly judge as one of the most irresponsible acts of any U.S. president ever, President Trump announced in a White House Rose Garden speech that the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate accord. In one fell swoop, Donald Trump managed to alienate the rest of the world, effectively brand the United States an international outlaw and hand over the biggest economic opportunity in the history of humanity to China. In a statement dripping with irony, Trump asked: “At what point does America get demeaned? At what point do they start laughing at us as a country?” This coming from a president who was laughed at for denying global heating as “fictional,” “bullshit,” and a “hoax,” calling it a concept “created by and for the Chinese to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” Yet it was Trump’s head-in-the-sand response to the climate crisis that was making U.S. manufacturing non-competitive. Without the United States at the table, who did he think was going to fill the global climate leadership vacuum? Who was going to help the other 194 countries still in the Paris accord meet their climate goals? By ceding the field to Communist China, a nation more than happy to manufacture the world’s climate crisis solutions, millions of lucrative green collar jobs that could have been created in the U.S. were putting people to work elsewhere. For someone who prides himself on the art of the deal, Trump sure delivered one hell of a raw deal to America’s workers. While China was charging into the future as the world’s #1 solar nation, the climate-denying Trump administration had us shackled to the fossil fuel past.

So what were Trump’s excuses for backing out? Citing statistics from a study funded in part by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Trump complained of “draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country,” calling the accord “very unfair, at the highest level, to the United States,” despite the U.S. being the world’s largest legacy polluter. He claimed the voluntary deal would result in “massive legal liability” for the U.S., despite it not being a legally binding accord. He complained it “effectively blocks the development of clean coal in America,” which presupposes “clean coal” exists. It doesn’t (Trump was referring to carbon capture and storage, the prohibitively expensive and unproven-at-scale fantasy of capturing carbon gas before it leaves the smokestack and injecting it underground where we’re supposed to believe it will never leak out).

As weak as the Paris accord is–its voluntary commitments fall dangerously short of what is needed to avert climate catastrophe–it is nevertheless the first time after decades of dithering that the world community agreed to do much of anything at all about the climate crisis. In that sense at least, the international agreement was significant, for it provided a foundation upon which to build going forward. And as weak as America’s commitments were, at least President Obama went along with the accord, unlike President Trump, who expressed open hostility toward it.

This despite the fact that his own voters support climate crisis solutions. A 2016 post-election poll by Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies found “75% of Trump voters support taking action to accelerate the development and use of clean energy.” In other words, Trump voters love renewable energy. “Community renewable projects like solar that enable consumers to share the benefits and save money on their bills” found 80% support in the poll. “Energy efficiency upgrades to reduce the amount of power we need” found 90% support. Most people who voted for Trump also support climate action. A 2017 poll of Trump voters conducted by Yale and George Mason universities found that 62% “support taxing and/or regulating the pollution that causes global warming” and 52% “support ending all federal subsidies for the fossil fuel industry.”

A green industrial revolution is something most Americans agree on. But instead of draining the swamp like he promised, President Trump filled it with the titans of yesteryear, who declared all-out war on renewables and the planet. Not surprisingly, reaction to Trump’s surrender to Big Oil was swift and fierce, and not just because of the lost economic opportunity and lost jobs. "Exiting Paris makes Trump the villain for all climate disasters to come,” declared climate blogger Joe Romm, explaining how Trump’s action screwed over his supporters: “[B]ecause clean energy is the sector most likely to generate tens of millions of high-wage manufacturing jobs in the coming decades, Trump’s abandonment of Paris is just one more way he is hurting the voters to whom he promised an industrial rebirth."

Americans were appalled. The world was outraged. But Trump’s decision to trash the Paris accord in such a high-profile fashion also had the unintended side effect of shaking many Americans awake. His Rose Garden speech, preceded by weeks of melodramatic will-he-or-won’t-he speculation inadvertently drew more media attention to the climate crisis than any U.S. president to precede him. Media Matters reported a major jump in climate coverage in 2017, with most of that coverage featuring Trump’s decision to withdraw from the accord. The most quoted remark from Trump’s speech was the one that backfired the most spectacularly: “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh,” he said, “not Paris.” Hearing this prompted Bill Peduto, Mayor of the Steel City, to fire back: “Pittsburgh stands with the world and will follow Paris agreement.” Mayor Peduto was far from alone. Within days, more than 1,400 CEOs, mayors, governors, university presidents, tribal leaders, and faith groups had signed an open letter to the international community titled, “We Are Still In.” This was followed by dozens of states committing to upholding the accord forming the United States Climate Alliance to coordinate state-level action. But four years of the U.S. missing in action on the world stage cost us dearly. Those are four years humanity will never get back.

Trashing the Paris accord is not all President Trump did to endanger humanity. Along with scrubbing federal government agency websites of critical references to climate threats, he made other dangerous moves to increase America’s vulnerability to lethal climate-charged disasters. He gutted the National Environmental Policy Act to limit environmental review of infrastructure projects. He expedited the approval of fossil fuel projects. He greenlighted construction of the northern leg of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline and the Dakota Access oil pipeline, both in violation of Native American treaty rights. Then ten days before Hurricane Harvey hammered Houston, he signed an executive order overturning an Obama-era rule requiring agencies to take projections of climatic changes into account for federally funded projects built in floodplains. He disbanded a critical federal climate panel charged with advising policymakers and the business community on current and projected climate trends. He disbanded the Community Resilience Panel for Buildings and Infrastructure Systems, set up by Obama after Superstorm Sandy. His Department of Defense also downplayed the climate threat posed to U.S. military bases and installations, dropping the climate threat from the Pentagon’s 2018 National Defense Strategy.

This next one gets a little wonky, but it’s too disturbing not to share. Despite his avowed climate denial, Trump’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a draft Environmental Impact Statement in 2018 that assumed a roughly 3.5°C rise in global temperature and an equally horrifying 789 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 2100 to justify gutting Obama-era Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards for cars and light trucks, arguing that the climate impacts from less efficient vehicles “would be extremely small in relation to global emissions trajectories.” Think about that. First the administration lies about the reality of global heating, then acknowledges it’s real, only to then argue that things are eventually going to be so bad, what’s the harm in making things a little worse? This tells you they knew the science was real. They just didn’t give a damn. The Trump administration ended up rolling back the Obama administration’s CAFE increase from 5% to 1.5% per year, despite acknowledging that even this regulatory rollback would cost the U.S. economy 10,000 jobs annually.

President Trump then picked arguably the worst news days of the year (Black Friday) to try to bury the release of the Fourth National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated report reviewed by a Federal Steering Committee that includes officials from the Department of Defense, Department of Commerce, and Department of State. But his ploy didn’t work. Coverage of the report–which projected a worse case scenario of up to 11 feet of sea level rise along the Northeast coastline–was extensive. When asked by a reporter about the report’s warning that our current heating trajectory could cost more than half a trillion dollars annually in economic damages by 2090, Trump’s cavalier response was: “I don’t believe it.” Yet Trump cited “global warming and its effects” as the reason for applying to build a sea wall to prevent erosion at one of his private golf courses. Former U.S. Rep. Bob Inglis (R-SC) called this hypocrisy “diabolical,” saying, “Donald Trump is working to ensure his at-risk properties and his company is trying to figure out how to deal with sea level rise. Meanwhile, he’s saying things to audiences that he must know are not true… You have a soft place in your heart for people who are honestly ignorant, but people who are deceitful, that’s a different thing.” Deceit like suggesting wind turbines cause cancer, a claim U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) called “idiotic.” Deception like trying to re-brand methane gas, which along with oil and coal keeps America in fossil fuel bondage, “freedom gas” and “molecules of U.S. freedom.” Nonsense like his claim that the U.S. has a “clean climate.” Absurdity like that portrayed in Adam McKay’s disaster film, Don’t Look Up, which portrays deniers like Trump and his enablers in such a tragicomic way.

No review of Trump’s climate legacy would be complete without mentioning some of his swampiest appointments. The irony is the guy who promised to drain the swamp filled his cabinet with more billionaires and millionaires than any president in U.S. history. Not since the infamous Reagan/Watt/Gorsuch era–which awakened my political conscience as a young man–have we seen such a brazen White House assault on the natural world. Trump tapped Scott Pruitt (who as Oklahoma’s Attorney General, sued the EPA more than a dozen times) to head the EPA. He selected former Texas Governor Rick Perry to run the Department of Energy (the same agency Perry pledged to eliminate while running for president). His choice for Secretary of the Interior, congressional backbencher Ryan Zinke, infamously shrunk Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments by 51% and 85%, respectively, as part of a mad dash to open up millions of acres of public lands to private fossil fuel mining and drilling. His pick of Texas oilman Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of ExxonMobil, to serve as U.S. Secretary of State speaks for itself.

One of Trump’s rare nods to climate reality was an executive order he signed in support of the global trillion trees initiative, but even that was undercut by permitting massive increases of commercial logging on our national forests. Trump even wanted to open up Alaska’s Tongass National Forest–our largest national forest, part of the largest intact temperate rainforest on the planet and one that stores more than 40% of the carbon of the entire national forest system–to more commercial logging. Other climate assaults included delaying ratification of a global treaty on limiting hydrofluorocarbons (a potent greenhouse gas with 1,000-9,000 times the heat trapping potential of carbon dioxide); rolling back Obama era rules regulating fugitive methane releases; eliminating efficiency standards for roughly half the light bulbs used in America’s homes and businesses; reopening creeks and rivers as coal mining waste dumping grounds; weakening offshore drilling safety rules instituted after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster; and exploiting the coronavirus crisis to indefinitely suspend enforcement of air and water pollution laws. All told, during his four years in office, Trump scaled back or eliminated more than 100 climate regulations. All from a president who thought we should follow his lead on climate because he supposedly has a “natural instinct for science.” All of this from the self-described “extremely stable genius” who suggested raking forests to prevent future climate-fueled conflagrations like the deadly Camp Fire inferno in Paradise, California. Give me a break.

In a 2018 Democracy Now! interview, famed linguist Noam Chomsky minced no words in calling out Trump’s climate denial: “I can’t think of anything like this in human history. You just can’t find words to describe it… it’s as if we’re kind of like the proverbial lemmings just happily marching off the cliff, led by leaders who understand very well what they’re doing, but are so dedicated to enriching themselves and their friends in the near future that it simply doesn’t matter what happens to the human species. There’s nothing like this in all of human history. There have been plenty of monsters in the past, plenty of them. But you can’t find one who was dedicated, with passion, to destroying the prospects for organized human life. Hitler was horrible enough, but not that.” It’s not that Trump doesn’t believe it. It’s that he doesn’t want to believe it, because facing facts would require putting the interests of humanity ahead of himself, something Donald Trump seems constitutionally incapable of doing. His pathological climate denial mirrors his election denial. Trump would incite a deadly insurrection and attempt an un-American coup before admitting he lost an election fair and square. Nihilists like Trump would see it all burn.

NOTE: The written form of WORLDFIRE is the authoritative version. Any inadvertent errors in transcribing the recordings are mine and mine alone.