Trump’s Proposals: Dangerous to our Climate’s Future

https://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/trumps-proposals-dangerous-to-our-climates-future

By: Jeff Masters and Bob Henson , 4:18 PM GMT on November 15, 2016

The greatest environmental challenge of our lifetimes will play out in a strikingly new and uncertain context with the election of Donald Trump as the 45th U.S. president. Trump has made it abundantly clear he disagrees that humans are changing Earth’s climate, and he has questioned whether our climate is changing at all. This places him at odds with the leaders of virtually every other nation on Earth, according to a Sierra Club compilation of statements from world leaders released in July. Among Trump’s campaign pledges, as summarized in Vox, are:

--scrap the Clean Power Plan, put forth by President Barack Obama to regulate greenhouse emissions from power plants
--dismantle most or all of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
--abolish federal spending related to climate change, which could end or disrupt the work of thousands of scientists and engineers
--“cancel” the hard-fought global Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation, which was years in the making and finalized only last year.

The roster of potential members of the Trump administration includes several fossil-fuel executives, and a post-election organization chart confirmed that economist Myron Ebell (Competitive Enterprise Institute) will be heading up Trump’s transition team at EPA. Ebell has long been one of the nation’s most prominent voices fostering doubt about climate change and its risks. In 2007, Ebell told Vanity Fair: “…whether it's caused by human beings or not, it's nothing to worry about."

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Trump’s election to the presidency of the most powerful nation on Earth is a serious blow to our hopes of preserving a livable climate for our children. In order to keep global warming below the dangerous threshold of 2°C above pre-industrial levels, we needed strong American leadership and a near-WWII-level effort to move the U.S. and global economy away from fossil fuels. Instead, Trump has promised to strongly oppose that transition. While Trump’s actions cannot stop the ongoing shift of our energy economy away from fossil fuels, they could still do a tremendous amount of damage, because there remains far more fossil fuel on Earth than we can safely burn while still avoiding dangerous risks to our climate.

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Even if other nations remain on board, the extra greenhouse emissions from the United States will raise the odds of truly serious consequences for many years to come. This year to date is the warmest in global records, and carbon dioxide concentrations have risen above 400 ppm for good, ensuring even more warming to come. The atmosphere is not waiting for U.S. leaders to decide whether human-produced climate change is real or not.

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