You just know that one of these days the pitiful excuse for “leader of the free world” squatting in the White House is going to flat-out label climate scientists “hysterical.” That’s what you get when you combine a blowhard scientific illiterate with a fossil-fuel puppet.
Donald Trump can’t stand that scientists keep reiterating with ever-greater intensity the warning they’ve been issuing for 30 years that our modern industrial civilization is unsustainably designed and generating ever-more disruptive and lethal effects that are going to get worse even if we alter our reckless ways this afternoon. So, as he does with every other subject, Trump pretends to know more about the intricacies of climate chemistry and the scientific method than do the scientists who produce reports like the newly released National Climate Assessment.
We got another round on Tuesday. At the Washington Post, Josh Dawsey, Philip Rucker, Brady Dennis, and Chris Mooney interviewed Trump for 20 minutes in the Oval Office. Asked why he doesn’t accept the latest climate assessment, Trump replied: “One of the problems that a lot of people like myself, we have very high levels of intelligence but we’re not necessarily such believers. ... As to whether or not it’s man-made and whether or not the effects that you’re talking about are there, I don’t see it.”
As he so often tells us, he’s brilliant. So listen up, eh?
My colleague Walter Einenkel took note Tuesday of the efforts of Katherine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University, one of the co-authors of the climate assessment, to set the issue straight. She did an exquisite job on Twitter of dismantling the pathetic responses of a couple of has-been senators, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Trump himself to the conclusions in that alarming, highly detailed report and their mischaracterization and misunderstanding of what’s in it. An important public service on Hayhoe’s part. But while you can lead numbskulls to knowledge, you can’t make them think.
The numbskull-in-chief has his own reasons for feeding the delusion of perhaps a third of the population that scientists are faking their studies of how the climate is reacting to being overstuffed with greenhouse gases. It doesn’t really matter whether he actually believes climate change is a hoax, as he has said, or if he’s just pretending to do so to maintain the backing of fossil fuel-related industries as well as the folks who applaud loudest at each of the man’s atrocious tangles of lies and ignorance.
Such people will never accept what’s in the climate reports no matter how much data is provided to back them up. Activists should stop wasting precious time trying to convince them otherwise. We have others to persuade.
After all, anyone who can listen to the wacked-out gobbledy-gook in the Post excerpt below and still buy what this crooked pitchman is selling simply isn’t reachable:
“You look at our air and our water and it’s right now at a record clean. But when you look at China and you look at parts of Asia and you look at South America, and when you look at many other places in this world, including Russia, including many other places, the air is incredibly dirty, and when you’re talking about an atmosphere, oceans are very small,” Trump said in an apparent reference to pollution around the globe. “And it blows over and it sails over. I mean we take thousands of tons of garbage off our beaches all the time that comes over from Asia. It just flows right down the Pacific. It flows and we say, ‘Where does this come from?’ And it takes many people, to start off with.”
The people we need to convince aren’t the ones who think climate change is bogus and that those remarks by Trump are intelligible. It is rather those Democrats who say they accept the science of climate change and agree that something must be done, but nevertheless continue to drag their feet when it comes to doing anything serious. They claim not to be deniers but, especially in light of the new assessment, delay is denial, and they support delay by their inaction.
Some prominent elected Democrats—governors, senators, representatives, state legislators, and mayors—have been extremely good on climate change and can be counted on to push for the zealous and extensive action the assessment shows us is required. Several newly elected House Democrats have also expressed views that show they get it.
Although this is encouraging, many elected Democrats have never seriously addressed the climate crisis. In fact, most Democratic congressional candidates who ran this year—incumbents and challengers alike—scarcely mentioned climate change even peripherally in their campaigns, nor did they promote renewable sources of energy and the jobs that go with developing them as, say, Stacy Abrams did in her Georgia gubernatorial campaign.
Trump and the Republican-dominated Senate form a hostile blockade to addressing climate change legislatively until January 2021. But that doesn’t mean Democrats should sit on their hands until then. At the national level, even though it can’t pass for three years, the party should draft a legislative package and campaign on it. A Green New Deal. A Green Marshall Plan. Whatever it gets called, it should focus on clean energy, good jobs, and environmental justice. It should be designed to accelerate the transformation of our energy, transportation, and urban land-use systems now underway. At the state and local level, Democrats can initiate positive steps despite the lack of national action. Over the past 15 years or so, several already have done so.
Every Democrat should campaign on the benefits of this transformation away from fossil fuels and other practices that bolster greenhouse gas emissions. Every Democratic candidate, every Democratic incumbent, whether running to be state legislator, governor or president, should be a climate hawk and act accordingly.
Democrats who fail on that score are going to be in for more vigorous grassroots pressure than they are used to in the coming two years, including from relatively new groups like Sunrise and The Climate Mobilization, heavily populated by young people and people of color, as well as from policy mavens like those at New Consensus.
Some Democratic strategists have argued that because Americans put a relatively low priority on doing something about climate change, campaigning on the issue is a mistake. This nonsense is just more counsel of delay. Leaders should lead. They should use their platforms and oratorical skills to persuade Americans that dealing with climate change must be a high priority.
As The Climate Mobilization activists say, we should treat the climate crisis as we did the crisis of World War II—with life-or-death seriousness. Our future well-being is certainly as threatened as it was then. And in 1942, even the isolationists weren’t saying oh-we-can’t-move-too-fast-in-confronting-the-Axis-and-it’s-too-hard-to-transform-the-economy. It was done because it had to be. Same as now. It’s past time to put foot draggers on notice.