New Yorker - "TRUMP AND THE TRUTH: CLIMATE-CHANGE DENIAL"

[TomCADem]

While Trump's acts and words as a sexual predator dominate the headlines, lets not forget that he is a neanderthal in other ways such as wholesale denial of the facts of climate change.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/trump-and-the-truth-climate-change-denial

Over the past four years, Donald Trump has, at different times, declared global warming a “canard,” “nonexistent,” a “make-believe problem,” a “big scam,” and “a very, very expensive form of tax.” During the first Presidential debate, late last month, Hillary Clinton pointedly accused him of believing that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. Trump denied it. “I did not—I do not say that,” he scoffed. But a 2012 tweet, written by Trump less than a week after Hurricane Sandy battered New York and New Jersey, was still up: “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

Trump’s “Chinese hoax” theory had been in the news before. In January, Bernie Sanders mentioned it during a Democratic primary debate. The following morning, the hosts of the Fox News program “Fox & Friends” played the clip for Trump, prompting him to respond. “Obviously, I joke,” he said, before adding, seriously, “This is done for the benefit of China because China does not do anything to help climate change.” His message, however scrambled, appeared to be that if China was not going to let “weather changes” slow down its industrial growth, then America shouldn’t, either.

Then, in September, President Obama and the Chinese President Xi Jinping formally ratified the international climate-change pact reached last December, in Paris. The agreement, signed by nearly two hundred nations, came after two decades of attempts to establish an international accord. It pledges to keep the global temperature increase to “well below 2°C,” or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, and “to pursue efforts to limit” the increase to “1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.” If and exactly how China and the U.S., which together account for forty per cent of the world’s greenhouse-gas emissions, will follow through on their commitments remains to be seen—the agreement is not legally binding. Nonetheless, the U.S. and China’s ratification of the agreement was widely celebrated as a breakthrough in the international effort to slow global warming. Trump, for his part, called the Paris climate talks “ridiculous” while they were happening, and has pledged to “cancel” the agreement if elected President. According to a Sierra Club report, if elected, Trump would be the only world leader who denies that man-made climate change is occurring.

Trump’s energy plan, which he laid out in a speech in May, would essentially reverse every step Obama has made toward reducing carbon emissions and meeting the goals established in Paris. (This, like much of Trump’s climate talk, is perfectly aligned with the Republican Party’s platform.) Trump wants to “rescind” the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan, which would impose new, more stringent regulations on power plants, especially coal-burning plants. (The plan is currently tied up in federal court.) Trump would also open much more land to fossil-fuel exploration and drilling, immediately approve the Keystone XL pipeline, and “stop all payment of U.S. tax dollars to global-warming programs.”