Friday, September 28, 2018

Climate Of Destruction

The Trump regime is more than happy to let the rich strip-mine the country for every last dollar of profit and let the poors kill each other over food and water while they stay in gated enclaves protected by armies of police with military surplus weapons, you see.  They no longer deny climate change will be a global catastrophe.  They just don't give a damn anymore, and never did.

Last month, deep in a 500-page environmental impact statement, the Trump administration made a startling assumption: On its current course, the planet will warm a disastrous 7 degrees by the end of this century.

A rise of 7 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 4 degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels would be catastrophic, according to scientists. Many coral reefs would dissolve in increasingly acidic oceans. Parts of Manhattan and Miami would be underwater without costly coastal defenses. Extreme heat waves would routinely smother large parts of the globe.

But the administration did not offer this dire forecast, premised on the idea that the world will fail to cut its greenhouse gas emissions, as part of an argument to combat climate change. Just the opposite: The analysis assumes the planet’s fate is already sealed.

The draft statement, issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), was written to justify President Trump’s decision to freeze federal fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks built after 2020. While the proposal would increase greenhouse gas emissions, the impact statement says, that policy would add just a very small drop to a very big, hot bucket.

“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,” said Michael MacCracken, who served as a senior scientist at the U.S. Global Change Research Program from 1993 to 2002. “And then they’re saying they’re not going to do anything about it.”

The document projects that global temperature would rise by nearly 3.5 degrees Celsius from what it averaged 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, which means the analysis assumes a roughly 4 degree Celsius or 7 degree Fahrenheit rise from preindustrial levels.

The world would have to make deep carbon cuts to avoid the kind of drastic warming envisioned in this 2100 scenario, the analysis states, which “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.”

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

The regime has declared that the problem of climate change is real, but it is too costly to fix, so America will no longer try to do so.

One has to wonder that since we apparently just declared war on the rest of the planet's population, how long the earth's other 7.5 billion people will choose to tolerate that situation.

My guess is not much longer.


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