For good reason, this paragraph in a WaPo report on the Trump Administration’s foggy position on climate change caught my attention:
Trump has vowed to exit the Paris accord and called climate change a hoax. In the past two months, the White House has pushed to dismantle nearly half a dozen major rules aimed at reducing greenhouse gases, deregulatory moves intended to save companies hundreds of millions of dollars.
What gets my attention is that the paragraph succinctly and vividly states both the putative reason / metric for removing regulations, namely Saving Business Millions!, and, through its second statement on climate change gases, the real metric by which this particular deregulation should be measured.
It reminds me that misdirection is one of the implements in the toolbox of humanity, and a prime example is in the current political scene in Washington. The Trump Administration announces the deep-sixing of a regulation, its pundits pronounce on how foolish it was of the Obama Administration to have promulgated such a regulation, the Trump base runs around celebrating the staking of another vampire regulation, and it’s left to the critics to discern the negative impacts of the striking of that regulation.
For those readers who think this is usual politics, no, it’s not, or at least it shouldn’t be. These transactions between our leadership and the citizens should be explained as to their goals, consequences, and side-effects, and while I wasn’t paying much attention during earlier Administrations, I do recall just such projections being made during the debate on the ACA.
The real arguments and critiques should be concerning the projections and unintended side-effects of the proposed changes to laws, rules, and regulations; we shouldn’t be critiquing the fact that these communications completely omit important details.
OK, enough nit-picking. Almost in passing I note this passage in the article:
“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.
The document projects that global temperature will rise by nearly 3.5 degrees Celsius above the average temperature between 1986 and 2005 regardless of whether Obama-era tailpipe standards take effect or are frozen for six years, as the Trump administration has proposed. The global average temperature rose more than 0.5 degrees Celsius between 1880, the start of industrialization, and 1986, so the analysis assumes a roughly four degree Celsius or seven degree Fahrenheit increase from preindustrial levels.
The world would have to make deep cuts in carbon emissions to avoid this drastic warming, the analysis states. And that “would require substantial increases in technology innovation and adoption compared to today’s levels and would require the economy and the vehicle fleet to move away from the use of fossil fuels, which is not currently technologically feasible or economically feasible.”
In other words, these guys aren’t the game fighters for our future that we’d like them to be, they’d rather do nothing but lay waste to the world, including their own nation, in order to preserve the profits of the fossil fuel industry.
Perhaps my interpretation is extreme, but this is certainly how it feels to me.
