Climate
change: Donald in charge. We’re all screwed.
 |
January 20, 2025. Map explained below. HAPPY
NEW YEAR – 2025: With only 19 days until Donald Trump is
inaugurated, let’s get this New Year jumping. |
If you believe in the threat posed by climate change – because you are not an ill-informed dolt, consider Team Trump 2.0’s choices to address the issue in the next four years.
Most members
of this sorry crew deny climate change is happening or insist it’s going to be
great for people who want to live closer to beaches, if it is. On a scale of
1-10, with “10” being best for real action on this issue, we rate Donald’s choices, and Donald, himself.
Elon
Musk
(5): “We shouldn’t be complacent about changing the chemical constituency of
our atmosphere & oceans, but climate change definitely will not end the
world as we know it! If people keep pushing hard, humanity will solve the
sustainable energy problem in time.” — Sept. 10, 2023, post on X
*
Vivek Ramaswamy (1) was asked
about the problem during his longshot campaign for president:
ABC News: “Do you believe in climate change?”
Mr. Ramaswamy: “Well, I think that with due respect, I’ve
talked about this in other forums, ‘Do you believe in climate change?’ is not
really a meaningful question, because climate change has existed as long as the
Earth has existed. Do I believe it is a fact that global surface temperatures
are rising over the course of the last century and the last half century? Yes,
I think that that is an established trend.”
ABC News: “As president, would you do anything to try to
buck that trend?”
Mr. Ramaswamy: “No is the answer.” — ABC News interview, September 2023
UPDATE (January 20, 2025): Vivek didn’t even make it to Inauguration Day. He got the boot, mostly for being an asshole, whom other assholes, like Elon and Steve “I Got a Pardon, You Didn’t” Bannon, couldn’t stomach.
Bannon also hates Elon, and recently called him an “evil guy.” So, we’ll have to see which asshole wears out his welcome first, at Mar-a-Lago.
UPDATE (June 6, 2025):
Okay, it was Elon. In fact, Bannon has started calling for Mr. Musk to be deported.
*
Sen. Marco Rubio (2): In 2010, Rubio denied that climate change was real. In 2018, while running for reelection, he admitted it was real, then studiously avoided mentioning a cause.
Too many people leaving their oven doors open?
More
recently, he told The New York Times, “The climate has always been
changing, and no matter what, we have to mitigate against it. No matter how
well you think you know the causation.”
*
Pete Hegseth (1): “Whether it’s hot or cold, the enemy is here, as far as liberals are concerned. And it’s all about control for them. That’s why climate change is the perfect enemy. They get to control your life to deal with it, no matter what’s happening.” — “Fox & Friends” 2019
With
that, Pete went back to his favorite pastimes – cheating on his wives (in sequence)
and sexually harassing women.
*
Elise Stefanik (6), before she became MAGA. Now (1).
Before:
“Withdrawing from the Paris Agreement is misguided, and harms the ongoing effort to fight climate change while also isolating us from our allies.” — 2017 statement
Now:
“Americans have had enough of Joe Biden and far-left
Democrats’ anti-American energy policies.” — March 20, 2024, statement
*
Lee Zeldin, who will head up the Environmental Protection Agency, pre-MAGA (7), currently (2).
Pre-MAGA:
“I think
that there is more of an awareness and a willingness to recognize that climate
change is real, and Congress is more and more open-minded toward identifying
those solutions.” — 2016 interview in Years of Living Dangerously,
a documentary television series
Currently:
“There are regulations that the left wing of this country have been advocating through regulatory power that ends up causing businesses to go in the wrong direction.” — Nov. 11, 2024, Fox News interview
Now, as
head of EPA, which is about protecting the environment, he says he’s
going to push for “energy dominance.”
*
Doug Burgum, Trump’s choice for Secretary of the Interior (5): When asked by CNN what he thought about human-caused climate change, he responded:
Burgum: “Well, I know the climate is changing, we know
that. And I’ll tell you in North Dakota, we’re the only state that set a goal
of being carbon neutral by 2030. But we’re not doing it with a bunch of
regulations. We said we can get there through no new mandates, no new
regulations, all through innovation. And that’s happening in North Dakota right
now. And again, I think if people want to have a discussion, if they think
CO2’s the cause, then let’s get serious about what we can to reduce that. Again,
there’s all kinds of things we can do that are more effective than the crazy
plans that are in place now.” — CNN interview, July 2023
*
Chris Wright, head
the Energy Department: He’s the chief executive of a fracking company, and his
nomination is supported by the oil tycoon, billionaire Harold G. Hamm. That may
be good for the development of energy. On climate change, however, he’s a (1),
only because we can’t go lower. “We have seen no increase in the frequency or intensity of
hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts or floods despite endless fear-mongering of the
media, politicians and activists,” he insisted in a LinkedIn video in 2023.
*
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (3) warned as recently as last April, “I believe that climate change is existential.” Now he insists “this crisis is being used as a pretext for clamping down totalitarian controls.”
*
Sean Duffy, most recently a Fox Business co-host, will head the Transportation Department (1).).
“If you say the climate’s changing, is it
coming from CO2 or is it coming from the sun? Where is — why is the climate
changing? And then you would say, let’s have a rigorous debate about what is
causing it, or what are all the factors that bring us to climate change? And
when you have the left that says ‘we’re gonna shut down alternative science or
science that challenges our narrative,’ I think it makes people go ‘maybe there
is a different set of priorities here as opposed to climate change, maybe it
actually is an agenda of control.’” — Nov. 11, 2024, Fox Business
Live
In other words, Duffy will spend the next four years tap dancing around the issue, unless we get lucky and a super-charged hurricane carries him away, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.
*
Okay, we’re running out of Trump choices we can hope will address this overarching issue.
We have left:
Scott
Bessent, who will head Treasury (1): His focus will be on boosting
fossil fuel production. As he told Fox Business: “We’re also going to have a massive
deregulatory program, and we’re going to have energy dominance, so cheap
energy, deregulation and a low tax rate – what’s better than that?”
(Not broiling the brains of future generations, maybe?)
*
Brooke Rollins will head up the Agriculture Department … and … ah, hell (1): This goes back a way, but in 2014, she was still claiming, “There’s been no warming in over 17 years. So all of this discussion about shutting down certain parts of our energy industry is nothing short of a disaster for the economy.” – 2014 Texas Public Policy Foundation event.
*
And we can’t ignore The Big Dumpling, himself, Donald J. Trump. This brain-dead fool gets a (1), on the strength of such statements as, “Climate change is a hoax,” and “Climate change will create more oceanfront properties,” and “Windmills are terrible because they cause cancer.”
Donald
has had eight years in office, or running for office, and still doesn’t know
the difference between climate and weather.
In fact, he’s gotten dumber.
UPDATE (January 20, 2025): You can argue all kinds of ways about what must be done to deal with the climate threat. If you think Trump and this sorry crew are right, however, you must ask yourself: What do the rest of the nations of the world know that they don’t? At last count, 194 countries, and the European Union, have signed on to the effort to limit the damage done by climate change.
A full list of nations that have not:
Iran
Libya
Yemen
– and now –
The United States.
Trump
took us out of the deal during his first term and Biden took us back
in, and on January 20, 2025, Donald took us out again.
FUN FACT: Solar energy had a banner year in 2024, adding 50 gigawatts of power to the U.S. power grid.
That was more added by one source of energy than by any source, in any year, in at least two decades.
FUN FACT #2: While you were making New Year’s resolutions to lose weight and cut down on time spent watching cat videos on the internet, scientists reported that the hottest year ever was just recorded.
Yes, for
MAGA fans, we can say 2024 was “Melania Hot,” for purposes of comparison.
Top Ten Hottest Years
1.
2024 (with a global surface temperature
2.79°F above average).
2.
2023 (with a global surface temperature
2.52°F above average).
3.
2016
4.
2020
5. 2019
6.
2015
7.
2017
8.
2022
9.
2018
10. 2021
The year 2014 is now knocked out of the top ten.
If you
believe in science, you should be worried for your children, and especially
your grandchildren. My oldest grandchild will be twelve in September 2025,
meaning she will have lived through the hottest eleven years on record. It’s
only going to get worse for young people around the globe.
FUN FACT: Fun, unless you understand basic science. The body of a baby mastodon, well preserved, was recently recovered from thawing ice in Siberia. How long had that baby been on ice?
Fifty thousand years.
This baby is not to be confused with the remains of another wooly mammoth found in thawing ice in the Yukon in 2022.
That ice: 30,000 years old.
And, of course, the remains of a saber-tooth tiger kitten, found in thawing ice in Siberia, would be entirely different.
But the problem would be the same. That kitten was in ice that was 35,000 years old. And with climate change, we are either going to get a grip, or we and our descendants are royally screwed.
