Category: Politics

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The Chilling Effect of Trump’s Climate Actions on the Climate Community

The non-governmental organizations and institutions dedicated to climate mitigation and adaptation have long been the backbone of efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions, develop sustainable technologies, and build resilient communities. However, the chilling effect of Donald Trump’s climate policies has cast a shadow over this critical work, obstructing progress at a time when urgent action is needed more than ever.

Trump’s systematic dismantling of climate policies—ranging from withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Agreement to rolling back emissions standards and cutting climate research funding—has created a hostile environment for those working in climate science, renewable energy, and environmental advocacy. With government leadership retreating, NGOs and private organizations face increased challenges in securing funding, influencing policy, and mobilizing public support for meaningful climate action.

Yet reducing global greenhouse gas emissions remains urgent. By reversing its climate policies, the U.S. is not only losing valuable time but actively accelerating the depletion of its remaining carbon budget. As climate models have long predicted, predictable climate-related disasters—wildfires, hurricanes, droughts, and sea-level rise—are arriving sooner and with greater intensity.

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Ignoring the True Cost of Carbon Emissions

President Trump’s recent Executive Order (EO), titled “Unleashing American Energy,” signals a significant shift in U.S. energy policy. While the EO aims to boost domestic energy production and reduce regulatory burdens, it notably targets the concept of the social cost of carbon (SCC), calling it “logically deficient,” “poorly based in empirical science,” “politicized,” and “absent of a foundation in legislation”. This move has profound implications for our understanding of climate change and how we address it.

What is the Social Cost of Carbon?

The SCC is an economic estimate, measured in dollars, of the long-term damage caused by emitting one additional ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. It encompasses a wide range of impacts, such as:

  • Rising sea levels
  • More frequent and severe weather events
  • Reduced agricultural productivity
  • Negative health impacts

By assigning a monetary value to these harms, the SCC allows policymakers to weigh the costs of carbon emissions against the benefits of policies that reduce them. For example, if reducing emissions costs less than the SCC, then the action is economically justified. The SCC is also used to evaluate the benefits of reducing other greenhouse gasses, such as methane and nitrous oxide. Estimates of the SCC increase over time because future emissions are expected to produce larger damages as physical and economic systems become more stressed.

Why is the Social Cost of Carbon Important?

The SCC is essential for making informed decisions about energy production, infrastructure, and climate adaptation. It helps to justify investments in renewable energy and other measures that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It provides a way to evaluate the trade-offs between short-term economic gains and long-term climate costs. Without this valuation, the true cost of carbon emissions remains hidden. Continue reading “Ignoring the True Cost of Carbon Emissions”

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The Return of Despotism?

Back in 2016, I wrote a post obliquely comparing Trump to Hitler. At the time it reminded me of Marx’s famous quote that history repeats itself, first as tragedy (Hitler) and then as comedy (Trump). I could not imagine that Americans could actually elect this buffoon as our president, and I had grave concerns about our freedoms and about our responsibilities to the biosphere. Many of these were justified.

The good news is that we actually survived those years and that on January 6, 2021, the vastly outnumbered Capitol Police turned back the deadliest full-on insurrection since, well, the Civil War. The bad news is that the feckless and immoral Trumpian effort may not be over.

The latest news is that Trump intends to pardon the insurrectionists if he is returned to office, and they may even be let go sooner if the Republicans win the House and/or the Senate in the 2022 midterms. We should be clear as to what this means. It is the sort of thing that happened after President Lincoln was assassinated, and Andrew Johnson presided over an accelerated reconciliation called Reconstruction.

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Sounding the Alarm

New observations show that climate change is already harming us in a wide variety of ways. Possible Planet is looking at what we can do about it, from rewarding carbon capture on a global scale to refreezing the Arctic. 

Mounting Evidence of Harm to Humanity and the Biosphere

Climate change—or, as Dr. Janice Kirsh prefers to call it, climate disruption1—is already upon us. The effects are real, costly, and increasingly measurable. Amongst several other dire warnings issued near the end of 2018, the latest report of the Lancet Countdown notes that “Vulnerability to extremes of heat has steadily risen since 1990 in every region, with 157 million more people exposed to heatwave events in 2017, compared with 2000,” and “153 billion hours of labour were lost in 2017 because of heat, an increase of more than 62 billion hours since 2000.” Moreover,

The direct effects of climate change extend beyond heat to include extremes of weather. In 2017, a total of 712 extreme weather events resulted in US$326 billion in economic losses, almost triple the total losses of 2016.2

Add to this the “excess costs” of rising sea levels, and rising levels of ocean acidity; the agricultural impacts and the spread of vector-borne and water-borne diseases; and the broad range of public health impacts—and it’s clear that today’s costs and consequences alone are reason enough to sound the alarm.

But the planet also faces other imminent disasters:

  • the loss of natural habitat and biodiversity, precipitating what is widely considered “the sixth mass extinction event”
  • the widespread loss of soil fertility threatening agricultural production
  • and wars, conflicts, and mass migrations that are already being precipitated by environmental changes

Though some people are still apparently unwilling to believe that climate change is real, or that humans are the major cause of it, these very real economic and biophysical costs are of increasing concern to global policymakers, public health professionals, the insurance industry, and even the military. And ironically it’s perhaps the risk to the economy, even more than to the biosphere, that will drive a meaningful response.

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Fighting Climate Change in Donald Trump’s America

Listening to Trump’s victory speech early Wednesday morning (and much of what he has said since then) has led many to wonder if the entire election campaign was a con, and we’re now going to see a new, more humane, Donald Trump as President. “Would the real Donald Trump stand up?” is a question several pundits have begun to ask. And in his first statement after the election, President Obama noted Trump’s “new tone,” and hoped it would continue.

Here’s a key excerpt from Trump’s speech:

I pledge to every citizen of our land that I will be President for all of Americans, and this is so important to me. For those who have chosen not to support me in the past, of which there were a few people, I’m reaching out to you for your guidance and your help so that we can work together and unify our great country.

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Hitler or Hillary? A Stark Choice

Why we all need to stand up and be counted

jcloud-spainThe mere fact that Donald Trump has been designated the Republican nominee for President should give us all cause for concern. No one with such a clearly authoritarian personality has ever been a plausible candidate for the most powerful office in the world. The campaign that we see unfolding before us is not a reality show, but a sobering reality. It is not unreasonable that we should ask ourselves what would happen if we were to stand by and not speak out against it.
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