Donald Trump and Climate Change
With carbon dioxide levels rising to 405.92 parts per million — the highest in 650,000 years — global temperatures rising at an average of 1.7 degrees F since 1880, and sea level rising 3.4 millimeters per year (according to NASA scientists), global climate is changing at an alarming rate, and not for the better. The impact of global climate change is primarily felt in developing countries where people are not shielded from the elements to the extent people from developed countries are. Droughts seem hotter. Rainstorms seem longer. Hurricanes seem wilder.
As the UN Chronicle reports, developing countries will experience the strongest hit of global climate change due to a rise in infectious diseases, heatwaves, loss of agriculture productivity, and asthma and other respiratory diseases.
Global climate change is not a natural cycle of the change in the global atmosphere, as opponents of global climate change would stipulate. But in fact, as concluded by leading climate scientists of the world, global climate change is an unnatural phenomenon in which humans are the provokers.
As former President Barack Obama has said, “we might be the only generation that can do anything about it.” However, if President Donald Trump keeps his campaign promise to withdraw from the Paris Agreement to combat climate change, then not only will America’s credibility on future foreign policy issues and relations with foreign allies be damaged, but also the world will suffer severe damage in the form of accelerated climate change. The president has already signed an executive Tuesday afternoon at the Environmental Protection Agency which will put coal mining related businesses before efforts to meet carbon emissions goals signed in the Paris Agreement.
As Dan Merica of CNN Politics explained, “Trump’s executive order [will]…direct EPA to review Obama’s Clean Power Plan, rescind the moratorium on coal mining on US federal lands…repealing at least six Obama-era executive orders aimed at addressing global warming. Including a series of orders that instructed the federal government to prepare for the impacts of climate change.”
President Trump’s recent pick for the Environmental Protection Agency (E.P.A.) Administrator, Scott Pruitt, is a known climate change skeptic. Pruitt hopes to work with the president in undergoing the 4-year process to withdraw from the Paris Agreement starting in the next few weeks, and to dramatically decrease the size of the E.P.A. in terms of funding, programs, and employment, according to a leaked budget documents (reported on by the New York Times). Instead, more financial attention will be directed to the coal and oil industry, both of which are proven by scientists to be responsible for much of the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.
The fact that the President of the United States of America recognizes this country’s position in being the world’s second-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, and still makes the steps to heighten that rank demonstrates the blatant disregard for climate science and foreign policy relations with allied countries involved in the Paris Agreement.
An unfortunate drive for economic advancement has blinded many politicians to the realities of scientific discovery. As time goes on, more and more evidence is found supporting climate change as a product of human intervention (through CO2 emissions) and more and more anecdotal experiences confirm the reality of this science.
