Trump’s climate idiocy is frightening
Should any normal world leader — a characterisation more easily passed over than defined — react to the fall of chilling snow with a tongue-in-cheek appeal for more global warming it might, in this season of goodwill to all men, be possible to share in the joke.
Should that world leader be US president Donald Trump, however, that plea just exacerbates the snow’s chill.
His willful ignorance, and, in world terms, seditious denial on climate change put him in the same category as the Roman Inquisition jihadi who jailed Galileo in 1633, because they found him “vehemently suspect of heresy” for suggesting the world might not be flat.
In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 29, 2017
Unfortunately, President Trump’s ignorance is not his own business.
His bombast stymies the world’s efforts to confront the greatest challenge of our, if not any, age.
It is not too fanciful to suggest that, in another context, if only academic, his stonewalling, his flagrant misuse of near absolute power, might be tried as a war crime against humanity.
President Trump has already dropped climate change preparations from US national security strategy programmes and has said America will not honour the Paris accord.
He has dismissed climate destruction as a Chinese “hoax” to destroy American jobs.
On Thursday, he joked from a holiday in Florida that, as record snowfalls blanketed the US east coast, America “could use a little bit of that good old global warming that our country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against”.
It is a cause for despair to have to record that never before has an American leader represented such a threat to the rest of the world.
It might be coincidental, but it might not be, that the arrival of a climate destruction denier in the Oval Office happened in the very year that oil’s recovery from the biggest crash in decades continued.
Oil prices are expected to achieve a second annual gain, after a prolonged decline. Benchmark futures are up more than 11% in 2017.
The oil sector is not the only one able to celebrate the new year with renewed optimism, though whether that optimism can be shared by all of society remains a moot point.
Last week, the EU agreed to allow carbon sequestered in soils and forestry to be taken into account, creating some wiggle room in our failing efforts to reach emission-reduction targets.
The concession was welcomed by the IFA.
Ireland’s 140,000 farms produce almost a third of our greenhouse gas emissions, which, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, rose by 3.5% last year to an estimated 61.19m tonnes of CO2 equivalent.
Set against these denials, responses to the warnings offered by science are more than welcome.
The suggestion that a vast offshore wind farm may be built around an artificial island far out in the North Sea seems to strike the right note and represents ambition on an appropriate scale.
The radical Dutch proposal envisages wind farms that would eclipse today’s facilities.
Dogger Bank, 125km off East Yorkshire, has been identified as a potential site.
The contrast between this real-world idealism, this determination to survive, and President Trump’s idiocy is startling and challenging.
