On Tuesday Donald Trump will take a break from tweeting and travel somewhere, West Virginia most likely, where he will stand in front of a crowd of loudly cheering, MAGA hat-wearing, ignorant racists and brag about how he’s destroying the environment their children and grandchildren will grow up in.
The audience will eat it up.
President Trump plans this week to unveil a proposal that would empower states to establish emission standards for coal-fired power plants rather than speeding their retirement — a major overhaul of the Obama administration’s signature climate policy. The plan, which is projected to release at least 12 times the amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere compared with the Obama rule over the next decade, comes as scientists have warned that the world will experience increasingly dire climate effects absent a major cut in carbon emissions.
Americans who voted for Trump knew exactly what they were getting. He promised them a return to the filthiest form of energy the nation produces, so a few thousand coal miners could continue to toil in one of the most dangerous and deadly jobs imaginable, for an industry whose insiders knew full well was on death’s door. The trade-off for this, of course, would be a tad disproportional as it involved condemning untold future generations to a substandard existence dominated by crop failures, wars, insect and disease infestation, forced migrations of entire populations, rampant wildfires, colossal flooding and extraordinarily amplified hurricanes. And of course, fairly long stretches of nearly unlivable temperatures in wide swaths of this and every other country in the same general latitudes.
But these people with the MAGA hats weren’t too keen on pointy-headed scientists telling them things their Koch-sponsored politicians, talk-radio loudmouths and Fox News didn’t want them to hear. And besides, even if a tiny bit of that scientific claptrap was true, they still would have the satisfaction of “sticking it” to that Black President. That made it all worthwhile.
The EPA estimates that the measure will affect more than 300 U.S. [coal]plants, providing companies with an incentive to keep coal plants in operation rather than replacing them with cleaner natural gas or renewable energy projects.
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By 2030, according to administration officials, the proposal would cut CO2 emissions from 2005 levels by between 0.7 percent and 1.5 percent…
By comparison, the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan would have reduced carbon dioxide emissions by about 19 percent during that same time frame. That is equivalent to taking 75 million cars out of circulation and preventing more than 365 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere.
365 million more metric tons of CO2 churned into an already overheated atmosphere is a hard number for even for intelligent Americans to get their head around. You can imagine how hard it would be for Trump’s base. And to be fair, for the ones who live near those coal plants, there are bound to be more pressing concerns than math. Like breathing, for example:
Under the EPA’s new plan, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides that help form smog would be cut between 1 percent and 2 percent by 2030 compared with 2005 levels. Under Obama, the agency projected its policy would reduce those pollutants by 24 percent and 22 percent, respectively, by the end of the next decade.
Those “sulfur dioxides and nitrogen oxides” don’t magically disappear. They end up in the soil, water and air, along with the toxic coal ash this administration has already allowed companies to dump into nearby streams. The coal-fed utilities that wrote the Trump proposal will save about $400 million dollars under this "plan.” That will go a long way towards buying several yachts for coal CEOs. There’s no evidence it will do anything directly for those utility’s customers, except keeping them dependent on coal.
As for the rest of us, I guess we’ll just have to be content with knowing the children of those folks wearing the MAGA hats will live long enough to experience the Hell on Earth their parents were clamoring for.