Category: Environment

Meanwhile, the costs of climate change in American lives and money are growing exponentially. They include more damaging hurricanes, bigger and more intense wildfires, sea-level rise and the spread of infectious disease.

Congress passed more than $130 billion in emergency spending related to climate change just between September 2017 and March 2018. That’s nearly a quarter of the annual non-defense discretionary budget of the entire U.S. government. Indeed, Trump’s own National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration finds that the “cumulative cost of the 16 separate billion-dollar weather events in the U.S. in 2017 was $306.2 billion.”

Yet budget tricks keep these huge costs hidden from American taxpayers. Lawmakers and the president are not required to increase taxes to pay for emergency funding. Thus, Trump and other Republicans deny the climate crisis. Eventually, when they get around to it, they fund the recovery but hide the massive costs from public scrutiny.

White House is cavalier about climate change

Far worse is coming. Disasters exacerbated by climate change will cost trillions of dollars by the end of this century, according to budget experts. In November 2016, an Office of Management and Budget assessment warned of tens of billions in additional costs from wildfires, crop insurance, flood insurance, health care spending and other problems related to climate change.

But instead of acting to address the climate change crisis and its costs, Trump is actually rolling back key climate protections at every chance. He is overturning major rules to cut emissions from power plants, cars and trucks, oil and gas development and many other areas, purposefully making the problem worse. One wonders when the American people are going to tire of Trump risking their safety, the economy, the deficit and our long-term security for his own perceived political gain.

Trump’s responses to the record-breaking hurricanes that hit America in the past 18 months have been similarly cavalier. He directly lied about the deaths of thousands of U.S. citizens, ignoring studies showing that thousands died in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017 due to lost power at hospitals and elsewhere.

Trump ignores real crises and invents fake ones

Infamously, Trump falsely blamed mismanagement of public lands and forests as the main reason for wildfires in California and much of the West. In fact, leading experts say climate change is a key reason U.S. wildfires are getting larger; a 2016 study found they had spread across double the area affected in 1984.

Major studies have also found that up to 20 inches of Hurricane Harvey’s record 52-inch rainfall was due to much warmer Gulf of Mexico temperatures caused by climate change, and that other recent hurricanes were also made more destructive because of underlying climate change. Yet why would the president let actual science and the safety of the American people get in the way of short-term politics?

Border security is important. Both Democrats and Republicans have said so and have serious plans to address it. But Trump’s dubious border wall isn’t about security, it’s an attempt to salvage a bogus campaign pledge.

Never mind that the actual climate crisis is harming average Americans every day — costing lives, undermining our public safety and hurting our economy. Trump only does fake emergencies.

Paul Bledsoe is a professorial lecturer at American University’s Center for Environmental Policy and a strategic adviser at the Progressive Policy Institute. He served on the staff of the White House Climate Change Task Force under President Bill Clinton.