More Thoughts on Trump and the Inevitability of Climate Change

The revelation last week in The Washington Post was shocking. A lengthy report out of the Trump administration acknowledged what so many feared, we're on course to 4 degrees Celsius of global warming by 2100.

What made Trump's report stand out was what they contend that means, how they spun it. By now we're used to hearing that we're heading for a 4C future and we have to act - now - to slash our greenhouse gas emissions so that we can avert that end-of-civilization catastrophe. We must decarbonize our societies. We must decarbonize our economies. As Hans Joachim Schellnhuber put it, we need to trigger an "induced implosion" of the fossil energy industries. We must do this if our grandchildren are to have a survivable future.

Trump's position, however, was just the opposite.

...the administration did not offer this dire forecast as part of an argument to combat climate change. Just the opposite: The analysis assumes the planet’s fate is already sealed. 

The draft statement, issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), was written to justify President Trump’s decision to freeze federal fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks built after 2020. While the proposal would increase greenhouse gas emissions, the impact statement says, that policy would add just a very small drop to a very big, hot bucket. 

“The amazing thing they’re saying is human activities are going to lead to this rise of carbon dioxide that is disastrous for the environment and society. And then they’re saying they’re not going to do anything about it,” said Michael MacCracken, who served as a senior scientist at the U.S. Global Change Research Program from 1993 to 2002.

My initial reaction was anger, outrage. This was villainy of the highest order from the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases, the country that uses 25 per cent of the world's fossil energy for just 5 per cent of the world's population.  America, the country that is on a hydrocarbon rampage, hoping to flood world markets with everything from thermal coal to oil and gas, conventional and unconventional (seabed, fracking, etc.). America, whose president withdrew from the Paris climate accord. America, the monster.

To vent, I wrote a couple of essays, neither of which I posted. One focused on our grandchildren and how, in very real ways, we're today writing their reproductive future. We are preparing for them a world that may be too difficult, too uncertain, too dangerous to even consider having children of their own.

Young people of reproductive age today are beginning to wrestle with that question. Is it fair to bring a child into this world when the future, their future looks so bleak? Previous generations, up to and including my own that begat today's young adults, were never put in their unenviable spot. What we mainly worried about was the prospect of nuclear Armageddon, the threat we ourselves lived through in the turbulent 60s and 70s. Nuclear holocaust, ah, no big deal.

The point is that the carbon policies we're implementing today will gravely imperil those future generations and will powerfully shape their lives in endless ways. And, by what right are we doing this to them?

The other spiked essay I penned looked at the honesty of Trump's admission. Is his really the only government that assumes the planet's fate is already sealed? Or is Trump's the only government that's willing to be honest about that assumption?

Have other governments, including our own, reached that same conclusion? How can we tell? They say all the right things, vow their determination to act to protect us and the world community, but are they just telling us what we want or need to hear? Are they credible? There's an easy, albeit chilling, test.

Let's begin with the powerful warnings we're getting from the scientific community. They've been testing the central hypothesis of global warming across a massive number of scientific disciplines - geology, physics, chemistry, biology (marine and terrestrial), botany and agronomy, glaciology, hydrology, atmospherics, oceanography, meteorology, epidemiology, medicine, and virtually every Earth science there is. One by one these disciplines have been checking in with their own evaluation of the central hypothesis and, one by one, they've been corroborating it. They've contributed a steadily growing mountain of research, their findings and methodology readily open to challenge by skeptics who now recede into the shadows.

What have they told us? They have shown us that, for the first time in the planet's multi-billion year history, a species, mankind, has shoved the Earth into a new geologic epoch, the Anthropocene.  This is not the planet's doing.  It is our own.

They have told us that we may have set Earth on an extinction trajectory. A mass extinction. We may be in the process of wiping out life on Earth as we've known it.

They have shown us, in the clearest fashion, that our dwindling hope for averting civilization-ending climate change, depends on slashing our greenhouse gas emissions, rapidly decarbonizing our economies and our societies. The prescription is there. It is clear as it is powerful.

We know where we're at, we know where we're heading, we have had plenty of warnings and we know what we must do if we want civilization to survive. We know that time is not on our side. Just recently the UN secretary general, Antonio Guterres, said we have until 2020 to implement major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions if we're to avert truly runaway global warming.

We know that Trump's response is "meh." What about our own government's response? How is Canada's government moving to decarbonize our society and our economy? Is it on the side of Team Science or is it actually on the side of Team Trump?


The idea that, on climate change, we're in the same camp with Trump is going to offend some people.

Is this where Justin gets his ideas about flooding world markets with high-carbon bitumen.? He hasn't said that our planet's fate is already sealed but he certainly acts as though he believes it. And he's following in the footsteps of his predecessors.

This goes back to Chretien and the Kyoto Accords. We have had three prime ministers with powerful majority governments and not one of them has come up with any real action to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

Chretien was dead at the switch. He signed us on to Kyoto but failed to follow through. Harper begrudgingly introduced watered-down targets for cutting greenhouse gases but also did nothing. Trudeau, after staging a wonderful photo op at the 2015 Paris Climate Summit isn't even on track to meet Harper's emission cuts target. It's almost hilarious. Oh, sure, we're going to have carbon pricing and that, kids, given the urgency of the moment is a smokescreen to excuse Trudeau's real priority, flooding world markets with high-carbon bitumen.

Trudeau is out to sell just as much of that climate-wrecking bitumen as possible. He's bought a pipeline at vastly more than market value, seven times by some estimates. They'll be offering customers a "too good to refuse" discount price that I call HRP or High-Risk Price. That's the ultra-low price they achieve by not refining their crud on site in Alberta and instead externalizing the environmental risk of coastal catastrophe, keeping it off the books in order to show a supposed "profit."

This, Trudeau claims, is the key to a green future for Canada. Yet not one dime of the federal government's hoped for bitumen bounty has been allocated to adaptation or mitigation strategies. Somebody gotta pay for the Justin Trudeau Memorial Pipeline and the market players don't want it. As for his vaunted carbon pricing and supposed deal with Alberta, that's turning out to be a non-starter with Ontario, Alberta and Saskatchewan flat out opposed.

Trump has admitted it. We're fucked. Trudeau is doing everything in his power to ensure that we're fucked while he spins outrageous lies about a green future for Canada. I guess sleight of hand makes Justin better if you don't look too closely.

Chretien, Harper and Trudeau, birds of a feather.

Just because those millions of barrels of bitumen produced each and every day will be shipped overseas, turned into oil and petcoke, and burned somewhere else, doesn't absolve us of responsibility for the damage they cause. Like Pilate, we wash our hands of the outcome as soon as the stuff leaves our borders. If we didn't, if we took responsibility for what we're putting on the market, how that will impact the environment and our own future generations, we would look like monsters.