Few adults in the room when it comes to environmental concerns

On the heels of dire predictions that if wildfires in the Amazon Rain Forest—almost entirely caused by human action—are allowed to go unchecked they will lead to a massive release of carbon dioxide that the forest and the earth that it rests upon has been storing for untold years, we are now learning that an equally troubling problem, the melting away of permafrost in northern Canada and Siberia, is also threatening to release massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide, of course, is the greenhouse gas that is the single largest contributor to climate change on the planet. You can argue with climate change deniers until you are blue in the face about what level of responsibility that humans have in the creation of carbon dioxide—and yes, there would be much less carbon dioxide and other pollutants in the air without human activity—but in the end, the question is what to do about it. 

And the answer, more or less, is not to do much. Donald Trump naturally says his administration has a “great” record on environmental issues, which everyone knows is just another load of bullshit. He has not only rolled back every environmental initiative by Barack Obama—including the Paris climate accord—but has made every effort to skirt environmental laws passed by Congress. In the quest to complete his “wall” of slats on the southern border, Trump has vowed to ignore environmental and wildlife regulations, even to offer presidential pardons to overseers who are willing to break the law for him. He is currently battling with California over whether a state even has the right to enforce its own stronger environmental regulations. 

It is not like we haven’t been down this road before; Ronald Reagan’s Interior secretary, that clown prince James Watt, couldn’t open his mouth without creating head-scratching headlines; he professed to not see the point in environmental regulations, since the “end of the world” was near, meaning the “second coming” of Christ, in which the world would either be destroyed or made-over. Gale Norton, who started out as a Watt protégé, was by the time she became head of George W. Bush’s Interior Department considered even further out of the mainstream of even conservative thought on the subject of oil and gas exploitation and “property rights” at the expense of environmental protection and human health. 

Nevertheless it seems different with the Trump administration, which doesn’t seem to have a coherent idea of what it is doing save simply to undo everything that has Obama’s imprint on it; policy based on simple personal dislike is simply stupid, and unfortunately it is what we have come to expect from Trump. His “stellar record of accomplishment” in response to the announcement of an official impeachment inquiry simply does not exist save in the minds of his fanatical devotees. Government by subtraction and destruction is the “accomplishment” of a spoiled child.

Who has the more “adult” perspective on climate change: Swedish teen Greta Thunberg—who gave an impassioned speech before the UN denouncing its largely inactive role in combating environmental destruction, or Trump? How about Fox News guest Michael Knowles, who called her “mentally ill,” or Ann Coulter, who thought that Knowles’ mentally-ill slur was “spectacular,” or Laura Ingraham comparing Thunberg to the adult-killing cult of children in the Stephen King novel Children of the Corn, and Dinesh D’Souza, who was pardoned by Trump after his conviction on campaign contribution fraud, likening her to a brainwashed Nazi Youth member? This is the level of “conversation” we are having about the long-term well-being of the planet? We certainly don't need actual scientists to muck things up, do we? These people act like there is nothing at all to worry about; everybody dies, so what me worry? Why worry about what you can’t “see”? If you breath or smell foul air or drink polluted water, well, you are just stupid for being there. If climate change-induced draught or massive weather events destroy crops, well, it’s your fault for not being a useless, overpaid spokesperson for corporate America who can afford to live like a Prince Prospero while everyone else lives in misery.

I always find it amusing to read about how Fox News’ Tucker Carlson calls Hispanic migrants “dirty,” and they make America “dirtier.” The truth is that it is not low-maintenance migrants who are making America “dirtier,” but it is high-maintenance people like Carlson who are making it “dirtier,” not just by their filthy, ignorant rhetoric, but by the fact that  it is people like him who create far more waste to pollute our environment. The irony concerining, say, the incidental waste that a homeless person he attacks creates and the outsized amounts which he himself creates is that it is often the people he calls “dirty” who are responsible for concealing the evidence of his wasteful, polluted existence that a lot of other people will end up paying for in the long run.