President-elect Donald Trump has already waffled on many of his campaign promises. He won’t pursue an investigation of his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. Now Trump says he likes some parts of Obamacare, so there isn’t likely to be a wholesale repeal.
There is also a faint hope that Trump can be educated about the dangers of climate change, which he had called a hoax perpetrated by China. Now he has “ an open mind” about climate change, he told the The New York Times last week. He even acknowledged that there is “some connectivity” between human activity and the planet’s changing climate.
If the president-elect truly has an open mind, he should quickly get facts and figures from the U.S. and international agencies that study climate change, not listen to industry-funded deniers. He should, for example, get a briefing from NASA before deciding whether its research is essential (it is).
The bottom line for Trump, not surprisingly, is “how much it is going to cost our companies.”
Trump and his team must ensure they look at both sides of the ledger. Complying with stricter pollution standards, for example, will cost companies money. At the same time, many industries already are being harmed by warmer temperatures and unpredictable weather and spending money to adapt to it. Coca-Cola, for example, already reports trouble obtaining the sugar cane and sugar beets it needs because of droughts and floods. Marinas around the Great Lakes had to spend millions of dollars to dredge or relocate docks because of low water levels. The ski industry, similarly, is making big investments in new water sources and snowmaking to deal with droughts and lack of snow.
Beyond his recent comments, Trump’s actions and appointments on the environment and climate change are very troubling.
He has appointed Myron Ebell, who downplays the risks of climate change, to oversee the transition at the Environmental Protection Agency. In a recent blog post Ebell called recent global warming “mild” and wrote that it “has been largely beneficial for humanity and the biosphere. Earth is greening, food production has soared, and human longevity has increased dramatically.”
This is in direct opposition to the Pentagon’s view. “[It] is clear that climate change is an urgent and growing threat to our national security, contributing to increased natural disasters, refugee flows, and conflicts over basic resources such as food and water,” the Department of Defense said in a 2015 report to the U.S. Senate. “These impacts are already occurring, and the scope, scale, and intensity of these impacts are projected to increase over time.”
Despite — or perhaps because of — this report, the U.S. House voted in June to end the Pentagon’s spending to evaluate the impact of climate change on its training, equipment needs and other preparations.
The Trump administration wants to take a more drastic step — eliminating NASA’s climate research. A senior Trump advisor, Bob Walker, told the Guardian that NASA should focus on space exploration, not “politicized” climate research.
NASA is the only federal agency with the technology and capability to measure the effects of climate change on the Earth, especially its oceans and atmosphere.
“We live on planet Earth and there is much to discover, and it is essential to track and monitor many things from space,” Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said to the Guardian. “Information on planet Earth and its atmosphere and oceans is essential for our way of life. Space research is a luxury, Earth observations are essential.”
This bears repeating: To survive, we must know what is happening to our home planet. Denying climate changes that are well documented is not a strategy. It is, ultimately, a death wish.
