As we begin year three of the Trump presidency, it’s no secret that the administration is hostile to facts. We’ve seen it repeatedly in the environmental space, and as Emily Holden at the Guardian points out, the same politics-over-reality approach is playing out in other areas, from school lunches to sex ed.
What Holden doesn’t mention, however, is that this fact-free approach is not viable. In fact, it’s illegal. As we’ve already seen, judges have been invoking the Administrative Procedures Act to shut down Trump agendas, be it racism on the census, DACA, pipeline leaks, or other environmental issues.
This is what makes a recent Harvard study about Trump’s replacement to the Clean Power Plan so important. By showing how greenhouse gas emissions would actually rise as a result of the policy’s delay of coal-fired power plant retirements, the study proves that the policy not only flies in the face of reality, but is also likely illegal. The Clean Air Act requires policies to use the “best system of emissions reductions.” Obviously, any system that increases emissions isn’t going to be best.
We better hope that case gets resolved soon. As a new report from Oil Change International shows, if the US continues pulling fossil fuels out of the ground and burning them, we’ll never meet the Paris agreement goal of limiting warming to 2C. Despite the noise some deniers have made about fracking reducing American emissions, it’s clearly not the savior the industry claims it is.
Unfortunately, it’s not just deniers who fail to see the importance of getting off of gas. There are plenty of moderates and liberals who decry the Green New Deal and Keep It In The Ground movement as too extreme and unrealistic. But another new study published Tuesday shows that the only way to stay under 1.5C of warming is to stop building new fossil fuel infrastructure. We can let what’s already built run through the course of its natural lifespan, but as it ages out, it needs to be replaced by clean energy sources.
The bottom line is new fossil fuel infrastructure built now will make it basically impossible to meet the Paris agreement goal without as-yet-unproven carbon capture technologies.
Politically, this may be a tough sell, as we’re up against the “social inertia” of the status quo. It really is hard to imagine the social landscape changing quickly enough to adapt to the far-reaching Green New Deal type of climate policy.
But to expect the laws of physics to change to accommodate the laws of man?
That’d be pretty arbitrary and capricious.
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