Some things just shouldn’t be part of the partisan-politics-as-usual mix. It’s bad enough that constitutional issues, the media, the economy, the military and foreign policy are subject to it, but what’s even worse–as in existentially worse–is the inclusion of climate change and its ongoing and impending impact.
We’re talking the ultimate bottom line: life and quality of life–not anti-bureaucracy, deregulation politics.
It’s frighteningly unacceptable–and hellish timing–that we would now have a president who’s a climate-change skeptic. Indeed, one who has appointed a former coal lobbyist to run the blindsided and bludgeoned EPA.
Because Donald Trump doesn’t read anything not fit for a bumper sticker or a political-rally teleprompter, he hasn’t read his own government’s Fourth National Climate Assessment that looks at how climate change is already disrupting life in this country. The report–with input from 300 U.S. scientists representing more than a dozen federal agencies and departments–is overseen by the U.S. Global Change Research Program and warns that action must be taken now. As in NOW.
The report minces no words on the ever-increasing threat. “The evidence of human-caused climate change is overwhelming and continues to strengthen, that the impacts of climate change are intensifying across the country, and that climate-related threats to Americans’ physical, social and economic well-being are rising,” underscores the report. “The global average temperature is much higher and is rising more rapidly than anything modern civilization has experienced, and this warming trend can only be explained by human activities.”
And Florida, as most of us know, is ground zero for what’s happening with storm surges and “sunny day flooding” from obviously rising sea levels. Even if this president, this outgoing governor and this incoming, Trump-lackey governor see little reason for public concern. Hell, Rick Scott even tried to ban the formal use of the term “climate change.”
And, BTW, the National Climate Assessment report was released on Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, a ploy by the Trump Administration to try and bury news of an inconvenient truth.
They know they won’t be in office or in residence on this planet when the worst-case scenarios they helped enable wreak horrific havoc. What an ignorant, nefarious legacy. A carbon tax never looked so benign.