Donald Trump's speech in the Rose Garden Thursday announcing the withdrawal of the United States from the Paris Accord marked a major setback, not for the left, but for the human race. Climate change has unfairly been catapulted into the center ring of the cultural wars in which our country is embroiled now, rather than being seen as a subject of intense importance and total immediacy. It is dismissed as "leftist bullshit" and belief in the ramifications of carbon dioxide emissions trapping solar energy in the atmosphere and raising the global temperature, is lumped together with abortion and gun control and other social issues, as part of a political agenda, which is untrue and absurd -- and which could sound the death knell for this planet. Not surprisingly, climate denying is Republican dogma and they have a big financial dog in the fight. Jay Michaelson, Daily Beast:
First, as recorded in several tomes including Naomi Oreskes’ Merchants of Doubt and Jim Hoggan’s Climate Cover-Up, climate denial is yet another example of lies spread by an industry with a financial stake in the game.Indeed, one of the leading climate denial drivers, the Heartland Institute, also spearheaded the tobacco industry’s campaign to persuade us that smoking didn’t cause cancer.
According to internal documents leaked in 2012, Heartland sponsors a fake “Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC),” pays scientists $300,000 a year to publish non-peer-reviewed climate denial, and has created a climate denial curriculum for schools. (Other focus areas include promoting fracking and eliminating collective bargaining for public employees.)
And who’s paying Heartland? Its lead donor is an anonymous individual who gave $13 million between 2007-11. Its other leading donors are the Charles Koch foundation, insurance companies, and a variety of family foundations. And Exxon.
Professor Andrew Hoffman, Ross School of Business:
To understand the processes by which a social consensus can emerge on climate change, we must understand that people's opinions on this and other complex scientific issues are based on their prior ideological preferences, personal experience, and values, all of which are heavily influenced by their referant groups and their individual psychology.
Physical scientists may set the parameters for understanding the technical aspects of the climate debate, but they do not have the final word on whether society accepts or even understand their conclusions. The constituency that is relevant in the social debate goes beyond scientific experts, and the processes by which this constituency understands and assesses the science of climate change go far beyond its technical merits. We must acknowledge that the debate over climate change, like almost all environmental issues, is a debate over culture, worldviews and ideology.
This fact can be soon most vividly in the growing partisan divide over the issue. Political affiliation is one of the strongest correlates with individual uncertainty about climate change, not scientific knowledge. The percentage of conservatives and Republicans who believe that the effects of global warming have already begun declined from roughly 50 percent in 2001 to about 30 percent in 2010, while the corresponding percentage for liberals and Democrats increased from roughly 60 percent in 2001 to about 70 percent in 2010. (see Figure 1 on page TK). Climate change has become enmeshed in the so called "culture wars."
Acceptance of the scientific consensus is now seen as an alignment with liberal views consistent with other "cultural" issues that divide the country, (i.e. abortion, gun control, health care and evolution.
Make no mistake, the speech that Trump read was written by Steve Bannon. It was an echo of his last masterpiece, the dark and militant “American Carnage” speech at the Inauguration, about which George W. Bush opined, “That was some strange shit.” Another Daily Beast article, "Bannon Wins And The Planet Loses":
As Trump prepared to take the podium, chief White House strategist Steve Bannon, the man credited with keeping Trump on a path to Paris withdrawal, stood in the shade with a coterie of senior staff, surveying the scene. For Bannon, the United States’ exit from the deal wasn’t just a policy victory, it was personal vindication.
White House officials previewed the decision ahead of Trump’s speech, and noted that the process for fully withdrawing from the accord could be time-consuming, but that the U.S. will decline to adhere to terms of the deal negotiated by President Obama in the meantime.“The president is going to follow the [withdrawal] procedures as required under the Paris agreement,” White House energy policy adviser Michael Catanzaro told Republican Capitol Hill staffers on Wednesday afternoon.
“We will initiate the process, which, all told, takes four years in total. But we’re going to make very clear to the world that we’re not going to be abiding by what the previous administration agreed to.
Naturally, they're going to do everything that they can to deconstruct everything Obama ever built. That has been the Republican agenda in this election cycle from the nanosecond of inception, no matter what the cost. A few more thoughts from Jay Michaelson:
Today is a day of great loss to the planet and to the human race. Climate change, an issue I have been writing about for twenty years, has already contributed to war (Syria’s conflict erupted when food prices skyrocketed due to unusually intense drought conditions), habitat loss, and loss of life from catastrophic storms. And we ain’t seen nothing yet.
But I, for one, still have faith. Like conservative lies about African Americans, conservative lies about tobacco and conservative lies about LGBT people, conservative lies about climate are still lies. They are demonstrably untrue, even if the largest industries on the planet are paying to have them repeated. And while truth doesn’t always win, it’s hard to defeat it in the long term.
Unfortunately, that term just got a little longer today, and a lot more destructive.
In a PBS Special a few years ago which interviewed survivors of the Titanic, one of the officers who was on the Titantic the night it sank and who lived to tell the tale, told of people who stood around on deck and didn't seem concerned. In retrospect and speaking from the wisdom of advanced age, he said that he believed that the people just couldn't conceive that something as big as the Titantic could possibly be sinking. We are in a similar situation right now, all of us, because we are on a planet where the greenhouse gas emissions, if not dealt with now, are going to produce an extinction level event in forty years -- if worse case scenario projections are accurate. This has been well established by the best minds in the world but this fact is ignored because the very subject of climate change has been insanely marginalized by the Republican party and trivialized by making it a part of left-right political scuffling, when it is no such thing.
I believe like Jay Michaelson that the truth will out. Eventually. But I don't know if we have that kind of time. I find it incredible to believe that the Republicans are playing this short game gambit and not worried about the world that they leave to their children or grand children. I have heard speculations straight out of science fiction, that the Kochs, et al. will buy up all the land in habitable latitudes and establish a colony for the rich -- and maybe that will be the legacy of the human race. The Donald Trumps of the world will procreate in habitable zones until somehow they figure out a way to screw that up, too. I don't know. My mental gears stop meshing at this point. All that I do know is that we must resist this newest insanity from the Trump administration with all our might because literally the world depends on it.