If the world’s governments don’t prevent the planet’s
surface temperature from increasing more than 2°C, then life on Earth
will become a difficult proposition for many humans, animals and plants.
Glaciers will melt, sea levels will rise, crops will fail, water
availability will decrease, and diseases will proliferate. Some areas
will experience more wildfires and extreme heat; in others, more
hurricanes and extreme storms. Coastal cities and possibly entire
nations will be swallowed by the sea. There will be widespread social
and economic instability, leading to regional conflicts.
Considering that the United States is the world’s second biggest emitter behind China, accounting for 16 percent of
cumulative global greenhouse gas emissions, the climate decisions
President Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress make will
be critical for future generations. But he has shown no sign that he’s
remotely interested in tackling what climate scientist James Hansen
calls “humanity’s greatest challenge.”
Contrary
to the view of the international scientific community, Trump has called
climate change a “con job” and a “myth.” In 2012 he tweeted
that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese
in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” He cited cold
winter weather as evidence that global warming isn’t real, tweeting
during a 2014 winter blizzard, “The entire country is freezing — we
desperately need a heavy dose of global warming, and fast! Ice caps size
reaches all time high.”
So, what could America’s newly
elected climate-denier-in-chief do to undermine action on the climate
threat? Here are five ways President Donald J. Trump could spell doom
for the planet.
1. Dismantle the EPA.
Trump
said would get rid of the Environmental Protection Agency, the agency
created in 1970 by President Richard Nixon that has become the nation’s
main federal lever for mitigating the impacts of climate change.
“Environmental Protection, what they do is a disgrace,”
he told “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace in October of last year.
“Every week they come out with new regulations. They’re making it
impossible.” When Wallace asked him who would protect
the environment, Trump replied, “We’ll be fine with the environment … We
can leave a little bit, but you can’t destroy businesses.” During the
GOP presidential debate on March 3, he hammered the EPA again, saying he
would “get rid of [EPA] in almost every form. We are going to have little tidbits left but we are going to take a tremendous amount out.” But
he has since backtracked, saying in September that he’ll “refocus the
EPA on its core mission of ensuring clean air, and clean, safe drinking
water for all Americans.” Still, his more moderate tone should offer
little solace for environmentalists. Last month at a roundtable in
Boynton Beach, Florida, he committed to cutting EPA regulations “70 to 80 percent.” The
person currently running the EPA working group on Trump’s transition
team — and a leading candidate to become the agency’s next administrator
— is Myron Ebell, the director of energy and environment policy at the
conservative think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute, who the
Financial Times called “one of America’s most prominent climate-change skeptics.”
Ebell, whose work has been funded by some of the nation’s worst
polluters, like Murray Energy, the nation’s largest coal mining company,
said, “I would like to have more funding [from big coal] so that I can
combat the nonsense put out by the environmental movement.”
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