December 16, 2018: President Trump Remains as Clueless as a Muffin

 

What does a muffin know about climate change?

12/16/18: Climate change? Who cares about climate change? Unless you’re young and might still be around 50 years from now. 

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“There is no sign that President Trump is interested in input from anybody on the scientific facts around climate change.” 

John Holdren, Harvard professor

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The Associated Press reports: 

The head of the government agency that monitors climate change says that in nearly two years he has never discussed the issue [emphasis added] with President Donald Trump.

 

Acting National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Adm. Timothy Gallaudet said in a press conference at a scientific meeting this week, “I personally have not briefed the president on climate change.”

 

…By contrast, Oregon State University marine ecologist Jane Lubchenco, who served as NOAA chief in the first four years of the Obama administration, said she talked with President Barack Obama about climate change every two to three months.

 

…Obama, she said, “consistently highlighted science as a key underpinning of his administration.”

 

As for Trump, he has consistently ignored warnings about climate change from his own scientists. 

“There is no sign that President Trump is interested in input from anybody on the scientific facts around climate change,” said [John] Holdren, now a professor of environmental policy at Harvard. “And his uninformed rejection of those facts — reflected in his administration’s misguided policies… on coal, offshore drilling, automotive fuel economy, clean-energy R&D, the Paris Agreement, and assistance to developing countries on climate-change mitigation and adaptation — is doing immense damage to the prospects for averting a wholly unmanageable degree of global climate change.”

 

The president could, of course, seek guidance from the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology and Policy. There’s just one problem. The office has yet to be filled. Trump has waited more than eighteen months since taking office to nominate anyone to take that role. 

On the other hand, there’s good news about the environment regarding Team Trump. The air will be a little purer tomorrow, the water a little sweeter. Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke is stepping down, in large part in hopes Congress will forget he ever rode into town on his horse and maybe not pursue all the investigations in which he’s a target. God, there are a lot of shady characters in this administration.

Sec. of Interior Zinke is out, under investigation.