It's hard to keep up with the Trump rogues gallery’s daily litany of crimes and lies, or their overall extremism and chaotic incompetence. It's hard to come to terms with the reality that an entire mainstream political party is so complicit in that extremism that it is willing to burn down the republic itself. But if the republic is to survive, outrage fatigue is not an option. But neither is ignoring the multilayered devastation that this administration's policies are imposing. Nothing less than the future of the world is at stake.
For years now we've known that climate change is the most important issue humanity has ever faced. It is not an issue, it is the issue. And for years now, we've known that on climate change, it's the Republicans versus reality. But with the immediate emergency that is this republic's existential crisis, with people being massacred in schools, with families being torn apart and every minority demographic under deliberate and sustained attack, it's easy to forget what else is going on. Or the depths and breadths of other crises, and particularly crises that are so complex that they don't seem immediate. But the climate crisis is happening now, and it is fueling the very rise of extremism that is undermining democratic institutions across the globe.
It was more than two years ago that I warned that the refugee crisis was a portent. Xenophobia is one of the defining characteristics of Trump and the modern GOP, just as it is with the rise of fascist and authoritarian political movements in Europe, and the undermining of the European Union itself. Climate-driven wars, droughts and famines are causing mass migrations of millions of people, and those mass migrations are destabilizing what had been the world’s most stable democratic governments. It is giving rise to political forces that are not only dangerously irrational, but blatantly cruel. And it will get worse.
Last month, those radical hippies at the World Bank warned:
The worsening impacts of climate change in three densely populated regions of the world could see over 140 million people move within their countries’ borders by 2050, creating a looming human crisis and threatening the development process, a new World Bank Group report finds.
But with concerted action - including global efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions and robust development planning at the country level – this worst-case scenario of over 140m could be dramatically reduced, by as much as 80 percent, or more than 100 million people.
The report, Groundswell – Preparing for Internal Climate Migration, is the first and most comprehensive study of its kind to focus on the nexus between slow-onset climate change impacts, internal migration patterns and, development in three developing regions of the world: Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America.
And that's just internal displacement. Overall:
Lord Stern, one of the world’s most influential voices on climate economics, does not mince his words when it comes to criticising those who take a narrow view of prosperity and highlighting the devastating consequences of global warming.
“You have to be a complete idiot to think that GDP sums up prosperity,” says Stern, who believes we need to develop broader measures of success and combine this with a return to core values if we are to convince people to act to prevent runaway climate change.
Stern, who wrote the landmark 2006 Stern review of the economics of climate change, says if we fail to take heed of the danger signals, we risk temperatures rising this century to levels we haven’t seen for tens of millions of years.
“Hundreds of millions of people, perhaps billions of people would have to move,” he warns. “If we’ve learned anything from history that means severe and extended conflict.
Imagine the human suffering, the political upheaval, the economic chaos, and the further environmental devastation that would follow. Last week, someone did:
Nuclear weapons? Famine? Civil war? Nope.
The United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, on Thursday called climate change “the most systemic threat to humankind” and urged world leaders to curb their countries’ greenhouse gas emissions.
He didn’t say much, though, about the one world leader who had pulled out of the landmark United Nations climate change agreement: President Trump.
Guterres is counting on the American people to step up where Trump is tumbling back. And from states to counties to cities to people themselves, many Americans are. But when the president has made the United States the world's singular pariah on the gravest crisis it has ever faced, that crisis has grown immediately that much more grave:
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt announced Monday that he would revoke Obama-era standards requiring cars and light trucks sold in the United States to average more than 50 miles per gallon by 2025, a move that could change the composition of the nation’s auto fleet for years.
The push to rewrite the first carbon limits on car s and SUVs, which came out of an agreement among federal officials, automakers and the state of California, is sure to spark major political and legal battles.
Particularly with California. Because the nation's wealthiest and in many ways most progressive state must be punished. And if Guterres is counting on the American people to help mitigate the damage wrought by the Trump crew, the Trump crew is just as determined to prevent that mitigation:
The Trump administration openly threatened one of the cornerstones of California's environmental protections Monday, saying that it may revoke the state's ability under the Clean Air Act to impose stricter standards than the federal government sets for vehicle emissions.
The announcement came as the administration confirmed it is tearing up landmark fuel economy rules that formed a key part of the effort by the Obama administration and California officials to combat global warming — and as the Justice Department sued to block a state law that limits the federal government's ability to sell any of the 46 million acres it controls in California.
The double-barreled move marks a sharp assault on the state's efforts to protect its environment as the Trump administration seeks to open more land in the West for mining, drilling and other interests.
California's elected leaders and environmental activists vowed to fight the push, while the administration argued that the state has exceeded its authority under the law.
And let’s be clear: Even Forbes magazine is reporting that Trump’s move could also have devastating economic impacts:
President Trump is planning to announce a rollback of fuel efficiency standards today in Detroit, a move endorsed by U.S. auto dealersand auto manufacturers. But going in reverse on fuel efficiency is a terrible deal for American drivers that will cost the economy nearly $400 billion while adding nearly three billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by 2050.
Energy Innovation utilized the Energy Policy Simulator (EPS) to analyze the effects of lowering U.S. fuel efficiency standards, which are currently set at 54.5 and 39.5 miles per gallon for model year 2022-2025 cars and light trucks. The open-source computer model estimates economic and emissions impacts of various energy and environmental policy combinations using non-partisan, published data. It is freely available for public use through a user-friendly web interface or by downloading the full model and input dataset.
But the environmental cost is the real story. As Inside Climate News explains:
If Pruitt prevails on auto standards, it would be at least as significant as the other main rollback of climate rules set in motion by the Trump administration—the attempt to dismantle of the Clean Power Plan limits on emissions from power plants. That one, too, is entangled in protracted litigation.
But there's a big difference that could makes the move on automobiles more damaging to the fight against global warming.
Even with the Clean Power Plan stuck in limbo, it's becoming increasingly evident that electric companies are going to meet the plan's overall targets anyway, because renewables, natural gas and conservation are all overpowering dirty coal in the marketplace for electricity.
Not so for cars and trucks, according to the experts and the lessons of history. Fuel efficiency, alternative vehicles and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are unlikely to progress without some kind of forceful federal action.
Of course, by announcing the withdrawal from the Paris agreement, Trump already has made the United States the world’s sole climate pariah.
Meanwhile, the scientific reports on the climate crisis continue to roll in:
Warm ocean water is melting Antarctica from below, destabilising its ice sheets and contributing to sea level rise.
A new study has used data from satellites to determine how much underwater ice is melting.
The grounding lines of eight of Antartica's largest glaciers are retreating more than five times faster than the global average, with over a fifth of West Antartica's melting at a faster rate than above. Overall, an area the size of greater London has melted in less than five years.
And on the other side of the globe:
The part of the Arctic covered by sea ice in January was the smallest for the month since records began in 1979, federal scientists announced Tuesday.
January ice cover in the Arctic was a whopping 525,000 square miles less than average, which is an area the size of Texas and California put together.
And because there was no El Niño this year, it was expected to be a better year. It wasn’t:
The maximum extent of Arctic sea ice cover this winter was the second-lowest since satellite record-keeping began, researchers said Friday.
The loss of sea ice is a bellwether of global warming, suggesting that climate change is not just something to worry about far off in the future: It is here.
“We’ve probably known for 100 years that as the climate warms up in response to loading the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, we would see the changes first in the Arctic,” said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., which issued the new data. “This is what we expected and this is exactly what has happened. It’s a case where we hate to say we told you so, but we told you so.”
The climate news this year has been almost uniformly bad. As reported in January:
Scientists at NASA on Thursday ranked last year as the second-warmest year since reliable record-keeping began in 1880, trailing only 2016. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which uses a different analytical method, ranked it third, behind 2016 and 2015.
What made the numbers unexpected was that last year had no El Niño, a shift in tropical Pacific weather patterns that is usually linked to record-setting heat and that contributed to record highs the previous two years. In fact, last year should have benefited from a weak version of the opposite phenomenon, La Niña, which is generally associated with lower atmospheric temperatures.
“This is the new normal,” said Gavin A. Schmidt, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the NASA group that conducted the analysis. But, he said, “It’s also changing. It’s not that we’ve gotten to a new plateau — this isn’t where we’ll stay. In ten years we’re going to say ‘oh look, another record decade of warming temperatures.’”
At astonishing financial cost. While Republicans are at least supposed to care about money, if nothing else. But no:
During 2017, the U.S. experienced a historic year of weather and climate disasters. In total, the U.S. was impacted by 16 separate billion-dollar disaster events tying 2011 for the record number of billion-dollar disasters for an entire calendar year. In fact, 2017 arguably has more events than 2011 given that our analysis traditionally counts all U.S. billion-dollar wildfires, as regional-scale, seasonal events, not as multiple isolated events.
More notable than the high frequency of these events is the cumulative cost, which exceeds $300 billion in 2017 — a new U.S. annual record. The cumulative damage of these 16 U.S. events during 2017 is $306.2 billion, which shatters the previous U.S. annual record cost of $214.8 billion (CPI-adjusted), established in 2005 due to the impacts of Hurricanes Dennis, Katrina, Rita and Wilma.
But those who care about something more than money have even more reason to be alarmed, and focused, and determined. Because the climate crisis is part of a global environmental and humanitarian catastrophe that will change everything about the world we know:
Billions of people live on farmland that is deteriorating and producing less food, and this situation could force hundreds of millions of people to migrate over the next three decades, a major report said on Monday.
The study, which is backed by the United Nations, said climate change and worsening land quality could see crop yields halve in some regions by 2050, and warned that larger tracts of degraded land meant conflict over resources was more likely.
The nation’s and the world’s political leaders should be focusing on this as their top priority. The impacts will be unprecedented and impossible fully to predict. Planning should be extensive and detailed. But with Trump and the Republicans we have the exact opposite. Not only is there no planning for how to prevent or mitigate the otherwise inevitable devastation, but they are actively making the crisis worse. They are punching the accelerator. And they are doing their best to ensure that their victims will be punished even worse.