Failure that Kills

The developed world looks on in horror. Not Donald Trump. Scientists uniformly warn, presenting indisputable evidence. Trump turns his back. Even unbiased governmental experts tell an honest truth. Trump has figured out to discharge them without violating Civil Service protections. Brazil is ablaze from environmental disdain and callous policies falsely linked to economic growth. A seasonal hurricane, continuation of a new generation of ever-larger storms fed by heat-rising ocean waters, adds to the fires, flood, ice melts, coastal erosion, expanding drought and unceasing rising heat.

Greenhouse gasses are basically carbon emissions, mostly man-induced (ever since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution), which create an atmospheric seal to trap the Sun’s heat on a cumulative basis. Mostly it’s carbon dioxide, the most common byproduct of burning, but other gasses – notably methane – are pound for pound devastatingly more toxic. Methane is 24 times denser than CO₂ and almost 4 times more impactful on the environment. Methane is generated by everything from belching cows and extracting natural gas to melting tundra where millennia of carbon-based life forms have built a massive reservoir of that heavy gas, waiting to be released.

It’s pretty clear that rising temperatures are inevitably going to make many parts of our planet uninhabitable, killing off a concomitant number of animals and plants, devasting agriculture and forcing disease-carrying insects to new regions. The litany of natural disasters, anything but subtle in the last two decades, will continue with even greater devastation. Experts warn that the hard dollar cost of this planetary devastation, just over the next decade, could reach $30 trillion. And that’s not measuring the cost in human life or health… or the loss of species through resulting extinction.

The big off-set, photosynthesis whereby the chlorophyll in plants extracts atmospheric carbon and replaces it with oxygen, requires massive forests, jungles and ocean plant life for that process of environmental regeneration. Cut back those greenbelts for whatever reason, and less carbon is extracted, less oxygen released (Amazonia alone accounts for 20% of the earth’s regenerated oxygen)… until animals (including humans) can no longer breathe? Is it any wonder that the voting generations that will most have to live with the negative consequences of this folly – Millennials and Z – have placed “climate change” at or near the top of their election priority list? And the news from Trump-land continues to compound the problem with total disdain for the consequences. Let’s look at recent additional executive branch policy changes that make a bad situation worse… from the same president who made sure not to attend that portion of the recent G-7 conference focused on the Brazilian fires.

“The Trump administration plans to roll back regulations on leaks of natural gas from wells, pipelines and other equipment, a move that could significantly increase emissions that cause global warming… The plan announced Thursday [8/29] by the Environmental Protection Agency would eliminate rules on methane emissions that even some major oil and gas companies have told the administration should be kept in place.

“Methane, the main component of natural gas, is an extremely powerful greenhouse gas, as much as 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in its impact on the climate, according to some estimates, although it breaks down relatively quickly in the atmosphere. Leaks from equipment and pipelines release it into the atmosphere.

“The Obama administration adopted a rule in 2016 that ordered the oil and gas industry to step up its monitoring to look for leaks and to take new steps to prevent them… The Trump administration’s effort to reverse course must go through a lengthy period of public comment and is not expected to take effect until early next year. Opponents, including California and many environmental groups, have already said that they will go to court to seek to block it from taking effect.

“EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said the rule is part of President Trump’s direction to do away with ‘unnecessary and duplicative regulatory burdens [on] the oil and gas industry.’…

“‘The Trump EPA is eager to give the oil and gas industry a free pass to keep leaking enormous amounts of climate pollution into the air. We simply cannot protect our children and grandchildren from climate catastrophe if EPA lets this industry off scot-free. If EPA moves forward with this reckless and sinister proposal, we will see them in court,’ David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council said in a statement Thursday [8/29].

“California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra called the EPA proposal a ‘monumentally stupid decision’ and said that the state, which has already sued the Trump administration at least 49 times over environmental policy issues, was ‘ready to fight this senseless decision.’… The oil and gas industry is the primary source of methane emissions in the U.S., accounting for nearly one-third of all emissions in 2016, according to the EPA. Agriculture is another prime source.” Los Angeles Times, August 31^st. To air is human, to breathe divine.

On another front, where published reports by the United States Department of Agriculture identify Alaska’s Tongass National Forest as an essential, oxygen-producing barrier to climate change: “President Trump has instructed Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to exempt Alaska’s 16.7-million-acre Tongass National Forest from logging restrictions imposed nearly 20 years ago, according to three people briefed on the issue, after privately discussing the matter with the state’s governor aboard Air Force One.

“The move would affect more than half of the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest, opening it to potential logging, energy and mining projects. It would undercut a sweeping Clinton administration policy known as the ‘roadless rule,’ which has survived a decades-long legal assault.

“Trump has taken a personal interest in ‘forest management,’ a term he told a group of lawmakers last year he has ‘redefined’ since taking office… Politicians have tussled for years over the fate of the Tongass, a massive stretch of southeastern Alaska replete with old-growth spruce, hemlock and cedar, rivers running with salmon, and dramatic fjords. President Bill Clinton put more than half of it off limits to logging just days before leaving office in 2001, when he barred the construction of roads in 58.5 million acres of undeveloped national forest across the country. President George W. Bush sought to reverse that policy, holding a handful of timber sales in the Tongass before a federal judge reinstated the Clinton rule.

“Trump’s decision to weigh in, at a time when Forest Service officials had planned much more modest changes to managing the agency’s single largest holding, revives a battle that the previous administration had aimed to settle…

“Chris Wood, president of the environmental group Trout Unlimited, joined with local business owners and conservation and outdoors organizations in urging federal officials to make more limited changes to the rule. He said the shift could jeopardize the region’s commercial, sport and subsistence salmon fishing industry.

“About 40 percent of wild salmon that make their way down the West Coast spawn in the Tongass: The Forest Service estimates that the salmon industry generates $986 million annually. Returning salmon bring nutrients that sustain forest growth, while intact stands of trees keep streams cool and trap sediment… Wood, who worked on the Clinton rule while at the Forest Service, said that in recent years, agency officials have ‘realized the golden goose is the salmon, not the trees.’” Washington Post, August 27^th.

But those pesky USDA scientists were providing too much in the way of facts that contradicted the president, so what to do about that? Get rid of them! But how to avoid Civil Service restrictions on firing long-term government employees. From the July 15^th, TheHill.com: “A Trump administration decision [in June] to move researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to the Kansas City area is threatening to spark the flight of more than half of the staff selected to move [it worked], gutting the agency of its top scientific voices… 

“Critics see the move, set to be completed by Sept. 30, as yet another example of the Trump administration looking to sideline scientists and researchers, keeping them away from the corridors of power. Administration officials deny that, calling it a cost-saving move intended to have researchers closer to farmers.”

But Trump’s true intentions in shedding those fact-providers came out: “At a GOP fundraiser back home in South Carolina on Friday [8/2], the White House chief of staff celebrated a decision announced recently by USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue… Hundreds of government economists and researchers based in Washington, D.C., the secretary said in June, were being given a choice: Move to Kansas City, or get out. They had 33 days to decide.

“‘Guess what happened?’ Mulvaney asked his audience. ‘More than half the people quit.’… The relocation, Mulvaney said, offered proof he was draining [the ‘swamp’]… ‘Now, it’s nearly impossible to fire a federal worker,’ he continued... citing his own experiences. But by simply saying to workers that they would have to move ‘out into the real part of the country,’ the agency had achieved its goal… ‘What a wonderful way to streamline government and do what we haven’t been able to do for a long time,’ Mulvaney said. Applause rolled across the Silver Elephant fundraising gala.” PatriotsandProgressives.com, August 7^th.

So many USDA researchers left that the agency could no longer comply with federal reporting statutes that these researchers routinely provided. Many were brought back under part-time agreements which paid them in addition to the retirement and severance benefits they enjoyed by leaving the service. We live in an era where anything that contradicts Trump’s view of the world is either unpatriotic, fake news, the enemy or simply eliminated.

            I’m Peter Dekom, and nature actually doesn’t care if the world denies the existence of natural laws… denial doesn’t change nature one whit.