Even Trump’s Government Admits Climate Change Is Real
By
Leonard Zwelling
At 2 PM on the Friday after Thanksgiving, the federal government released the congressionally mandated report on climate change. To sum it up, we’re in a lot of trouble. If drastic steps are not taken quickly, the United States and its economy will suffer tremendously from the ravages of climate change on farmland, coastal cities and areas prone to fire. It’s not hard to believe given the three recent floods in Houston, the fires in California, the damage of Sandy in the Northeast, and the numerous examples of days when the air is unfit to breath. Florida, Texas, California and the entire East Coast are doomed to withstand the combined onslaught of flooding, storms, blazing summer heat and frozen winters. And make no mistake about it, it can and will get worse than already has been suffered.
I understand that the flagrantly deregulatory Trump Administration is doing everything it can to make things worse. Local governments are going to have to resist on their own until there is a new, woke occupant of the Oval Office. Trump is simply too stubborn and too dim to comprehend the damage that his plans to unleash the economy through deregulation are doing.
I think the real culprit here is shallow thinking. There just is too much emphasis placed on the short-term gains of allowing autos to have more polluting emissions and factories to do the same. For reasons that are unclear to me beyond pure selfishness, the leaders of the country and its industries simply cannot come to grip with the benefits to be gained by joining the rest of the world in curtailing toxic emissions and environmental pollution. Al Gore warned us all about this years ago and no one in leadership listened to him. I am not sure whether or not this latest report will change the mind of anyone in the Trump Administration or even get Congress, which mandated the report, to act to improve things.
Let’s say for a moment, that you don’t believe in climate change although how you could retain such a theory is beyond me. Even if you do, you can entertain the possibility that you are wrong and that climate change might be real. If it is, then surely taking every step possible to decrease pollution, encourage recycling, update our infrastructure, and regulate all of it would be a good bet. If there is climate change, this might save us. If there isn’t, it can’t hurt. By contrast, if you believe in climate change, surely you cannot object to more regulation and you can admit that if you are wrong and climate change is not real, the regulation cannot hurt.
Any way you slice it, doing everything we can as a nation to decrease the threat of climate change to our people and to our economy has got to be a good thing.
Perhaps, the next presidential election will have as one of its key points, the need to alter the regulatory environment to accommodate the possibility that climate change is real. Mr. Trump will object. His opponent will be for climate change belief and the need to alter our behavior accordingly. Let’s hope the good guys finally win this one—for the sake of our grandchildren.
