Trump's New Climate Plan Involves a Guy Who Compared Pollution to 'Jews Under Hitler'
Withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement was only the beginning. According to a new report from the New York Times, the Trump administration is poised to enter a dangerous, politically motivated new front of its war on climate science. “It reminds me of the Soviet Union,” Philip Duffey, an expert who served on the National Academy of Sciences, told the paper.
In the coming months, the White House is expected to officially vanquish what’s left of Obama-era regulations to curb emissions from tailpipes and power plants. Though the scientific community agrees that to pumping carbon dioxide into the environment will be catastrophic for future generations, the administration isn’t very concerned with the state of the planet beyond the president’s potential lifespan. According to the Times, U.S. Geological Survey Director James Reilly — a former petroleum geologist appointed by Trump — has ordered his office to only study the effects of climate change up to 2040. Doing so would paint a relatively rosy picture of the effects of climate change, as the rate of warming isn’t expected to increase precipitously until the middle of the century.
Such ignorance of the future will be one of the tentpoles of the administration’s combative approach to the environment. Not only will the USGS turn a blind eye to life after 2040, “worst-case scenario” projections may not be included in federal reports on climate science, including the National Climate Assessment, which several government agencies collaborate to produce around every four years.
The the most recent National Climate Assessment was released last fall. It didn’t quite jibe with the Trump administration’s refusal to acknowledge climate science. “Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities,” researchers wrote in a report that spanned 1,600 pages. They added that the impacts of climate change are “projected to intensify in the future” and that the “severity of future impacts will depend largely on actions taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to the changes that will occur.”
-more-
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-new-climate-plan-840748/
= new reply since forum marked as read
