Ivanka Trump Will Not Save The Planet - Climate Progress

[hatrack]

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Gore is a compelling surrogate for climate action, and politicians know that having him as an ally is often a way to boost their own climate credentials. And while details of the Ivanka/Gore Climate Summit of 2016 have yet to emerge, it’s likely Ivanka — a savvy businesswoman — knows that simply meeting with Gore, regardless of substance, lends a credibility to her climate crusade that anonymously sourced articles in Politico or documentaries and discussions with DiCaprio could never give her.

There’s just one tiny problem: Ivanka Trump is not going to be the next President of the United States. Ivanka Trump isn’t even legally allowed to assume any kind of policy-making or advising rule, thanks to laws against nepotism and the fact that Ivanka is expected to take on more responsibilities in running her father’s businesses when he becomes president. Which means that for all her professed interest in climate, Ivanka isn’t going to be the one actually pulling the strings of climate policy and regulation in the United States — that will fall to her father, and the advisers and cabinet members that he is surrounding himself with.

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And when it comes to the people that will be making the policies that dictate issues crucial to climate action — from fossil fuel extraction to renewable energy funding — Trump and his cohort could not be further removed from Gore. Trump has called climate change a “hoax,” and has argued that cold weather disproves the phenomenon of global climate change. During the campaign — and in the weeks following his election — he has called for unfettered fossil fuel production, promising to lift the federal moratorium on coal mining and restrictions on offshore drilling. He has also promised to end President Obama’s signature piece of climate legislation, the Clean Power Plan, and pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement.

His White House chief of staff, Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus, supports Trump’s climate denial, telling Fox News Sunday that Trump thinks man-made climate change — which 97 percent of actively-publishing climate scientists accept as fact— is mostly “a bunch of bunk.” Trump’s choice for Chief White House Strategist, Steve Bannon, is the man behind the white nationalist site Breitbart News, which consistently peddles climate misinformation and conspiracy theories, arguing that climate change is a hoax created by activists, scientists, and renewable energy executives. His national security team — from his national security advisers to his choice for CIA director — have repeatedly chosen to disregard the Department of Defense’s assessment that climate change poses a threat to national security. His potential nominees for the Department of the Interior, the Department of Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency represent a veritable wish-list for pro-fossil fuel interests and climate deniers like the Koch brothers. That list includes the leader of the EPA transition team and noted climate denier Myron Ebell, who once said that global warming is “nothing to worry about,” to the head of the Department of the Interior transition team, Doug Domenech, who serves as chair of the far-right Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Fueling Freedom Project, which exists to argue “the forgotten moral case for fossil fuels.”

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Ivanka Trump is 35 years old — statistically, that makes her part of the generation that is most likely to care about climate change. So it is possible Ivanka is entirely earnest in her desire to learn more about, and spotlight the issue of, global climate change. But that does not in any way change the fact that her father — the president-elect — is a climate denier who has consistently championed policies that would be incredibly destructive to the climate, and has thus far chosen to surround himself with equally-climate denying advisers. Don’t get distracted. It will be those men and women, not Ivanka Trump, who will be dictating U.S. climate policy for at least the next four years.

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https://thinkprogress.org/ivanka-trump-climate-distraction-77277d9b8ee3#.v1oexvisj

[FarCenter]

1. It's not about climate -- it's about stretching out the economically extractable fossil fuel reserve

And Trump has by now had the classified briefings on reserve estimations from the intelligence community.