
Donald Trump started off his second term as US president on January 20th in his normal bombastic, moronic, self-aggrandizing, and narcissistic way. I was going to use the word style, but decided not to because we should never associate the word style with the Donald. I substituted manner, but decided that he didn’t have manners either. So, I just went for the easy way out.
Lest you haven’t realized it, and in interests of full disclosure, I despise Donald John Trump. At the very best he’s an embarrassment to democracies everywhere, and at worst he could be one of the most dangerous men on the planet. I anticipated that his first day would be a shit show, and he did not disappoint.
He did some obnoxious things on day one, like pardoning the Jan 6th criminals, including one guy who used a taser on a police officer who suffered cardiac arrest and a traumatic brain injury as a result. He removed protections against discrimination in schools on the basis of gender or sexual orientation, and he eliminated requirements for DEI in hiring within the government. Raw meat for the MAGA social conservatives.
He also withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization. That might be seen as a dangerous attack on health science, but I think it really is more reflective of his isolationist views, and his desire to stop having US providing funds to solve other peoples’ problems. Mind you, the decision to withdraw from WHO coupled with the bizarre appointment of RFK Jr. as Secretary of Health doesn’t bode well for the maintenance of important vaccination programs in the US.
But of all the things he announced, the items that I think history will record as terrible errors are i) the withdrawal of the United States of America from the Paris accord on climate change, and ii) the declaration of an energy emergency that will accelerate the production of oil and gas in the US (drill, baby, drill).
I mentioned my concerns to a friend, and he said “doesn’t matter. They’re not meeting targets anyway.” There’s a certain brutal truth about that, but it underestimates the impacts of Trump’s path forward. Like it or not (and I don’t), America is still the biggest economy and the most influential country in the world. If they walk away from the Paris Accord, it gives other nations an excuse to do the same. Alternatively, other nations can pay lip service to the Paris Accord goals, and fail, and say “but we’re doing better than the US”. Further, the US economy, freed of troublesome things like regulations on CO2 emission, may begin to grow at the expense of other nations’ economies. If that happens, then other national governments will come under pressure from their citizenry to solve their economic problems. And that will prompt those governments to try to level the playing field, which means that climate targets will be seen as just another nuisance.
The Paris Accord, remember, was just the first part of a one-two punch. The second part was the declaration of an energy emergency. The point of the energy emergency was to allow the administration to remove regulations that constrain the oil and gas industry. Oil and gas exploration projects, pipelines, fracking projects – all will be approved with the barest minimum of regulatory scrutiny. That signals that the Trump administration is fully committed to the oil and gas industry. They are turning the clock back on climate change initiatives. I don’t anticipate much commitment from them to alternative energy sources.
The consequences of government inaction on climate change are already painfully apparent. Two weeks before the grand Trump inauguration, Los Angeles started burning. As of January 21st, 29 people have died in the fires and more than 16000 homes have been destroyed. Of course, President Trump geared up his blame gun and laid it all at the feet of California governor, Gavin Newsom.
CBS News did some fact checking on Trump’s utterances, and found that, as usual, there was no truth there. Yes, there were fire hydrants that ran out, but it had nothing to do with the Trump legislation that Governor Newsom had overturned. The fire hydrants ran dry because “all three 1-million-gallon water tanks in the area ran dry by 3 a.m… couldn’t refill fast enough as firefighting efforts drained water faster than the main trunk line could supply it.” The real cause of those fires was that “the lack of rain in the region in recent months dried out vegetation… (and) when city water infrastructure was built decades ago, planners didn’t anticipate the conditions brought on by global warming.”
The 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on climate change told us that at an average increase of 1.5 degrees C, coral reefs are postulated to begin to die. In November 2024, an ABC News article reported that 44% of the world’s coral reefs are already at risk of extinction. A Reuters article in October 2024 reported that 77% of the world’s coral reefs had suffered heat bleaching events since February of 2023.
That same report told us that polar ice caps are at risk. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), an American scientific and regulatory agency, tells us that the Arctic minimum summertime ice coverage which was at about 7.5 million square kilometers around 1980 has reduced steadily in the years since then and was at approximately 4.1 million kilometers in 2024.
I table those two bits of information merely to make this point – that the consequences predicted by the IPCC are coming true, and rapidly. The fact that climate change predictions are aligned with observed outcomes is powerful evidence in support of the underlying hypothesis.
Climate change is a happening thing, baby. We can all observe that wildfires are more extensive, and that hurricanes are becoming stronger and more frequent. Less dramatic, and therefore less visible is the growth in desertification. According to the UN, an estimated 1.5 billion hectares of productive land have now been lost, impacting the lives of 1.3 billion people.
The sad thing is that it need not have happened. Some time ago I wrote that we could be forgiven for having climate change overtake us because we haven’t been aware of it for very long and it takes a long time to change the habits of 7 billion people. I was wr…wr… The fact is that government and industry leaders have known for years that truth of climate science and have participated in an active program to suppress that science.
Scientists told us in the early 1800’s that this could happen. In 1938, a man named Guy Callendar told us that it wasn’t theoretical – it was actually happening. He manually collected data from 147 weather stations and calculated that global temperature had already risen 0.3 degrees.
Measurements going back to 1958 (the Keeling curve) show us that atmospheric CO2 has risen from 315 ppm in 1958 and have trended upwards ever since, reaching about 415 ppm in 2023. So, we’ve known for a long time, if only we’d been reading the tea-leaves correctly.
Knowledge inside the scientific community doesn’t turn into policy, of course, until it’s painfully obvious and accepted by the political community as a whole. At this point in history, there are only two types of people who profess not to accept the global warming hypothesis and data. The first group is the conspiracy theorists and there’s not much we can do about them, poor deluded trusting souls that they are. But the second type of climate change denier is the person who refuses to accept the abundant evidence before us because it is economically, or politically, beneficial to that person to ignore the problem. Al Gore nailed it – climate change is An Inconvenient Truth.
The general public has had poor awareness of climate change. But the reason for that lack of awareness is that people who did know, and who should have known what to do about it, deliberately obscured the truth. We have been lied to, misled, and fed disinformation by those who had a duty to lead.
What I’m about to tell you perhaps isn’t exactly news. Articles about what ExxonMobil and other big companies knew started appearing at least ten years ago. Personally, I was unaware of those articles. It has been something of a revelation for me to find out how pervasive the campaign against climate change has been. The following information is drawn from several sources. There are a couple of articles from the American Sociological Association which study the Climate Change Counter Movement (CCCM) as a sociological and cultural phenomenon. There was also a terrific article in Science.org magazine a highly rated scientific publication.
Here are the bones of the CCCM.
- The oil and gas industry has known and understood the impact of atmospheric carbon dioxide since at least 1977. The science.org article tells me that ExxonMobil’s own scientific studies and a number of their internal memos “accurately projected and skillfully modeled global warming due to fossil fuel burning”. Despite those internal reports and memos, ExxonMobil and other oil companies have continued to deny the climate change risk, claiming that “scientific uncertainties continue to limit our ability to make objective, quantitative determinations regarding the human role in recent climate change. That explanation was contrary to the analysis of their own scientists.
- Corporate interests have subverted and influenced politicians who have become complicit in climate science denial:
- “Corporations have been increasingly funding political action committees as a way of impacting climate change legislation.” Research has shown that targeted political action committee funding significantly decreases the odds that candidates will take pro-climate stances.
- The oil and gas industry gave…a staggering $219,079,058 to influence the 2024 election. The vast majority of this money went to Republicans, including nearly $23 million of oil and gas money donated to Donald Trump’s campaign and PACs supporting him.
- The Republican party’s “long-term embrace of anti-regulatory ideology, supplemented by heavy funding from fossil fuel interests and its recent embrace of scientific misinformation, has turned it into a major force of obstruction. Republicans in Congress frequently attack climate scientists and science. They hold hearings stacked with contrarians and other leading deniers and block efforts to curb fossil fuel use. The George W. Bush and Trump administrations, especially the latter, took extraordinary steps to undermine climate science and block regulatory action.
- Conservative think tanks, foundations like the Heritage Foundation, conservative media, false front “grass roots” protest groups, and advertising and lobbying groups are attacking climate science as uncertain, unreliable, alarmist, and wrong.The establishment and funding of The Heritage Foundation and several others like it, and the campaign of disinformation and harassment conducted against the climate science community is well documented in the book Dark Money by Jane Meyer. (See also “The Dark Money Conspiracy” CurleyCues.com, December 2022)
- Corporations are undermining the academic integrity of major universities.
- “major oil companies such as ExxonMobil, Shell, and Chevron Corporation fund large energy research programs at major universities (e.g., Harvard University, Stanford University, and MIT) over which they have considerable influence, leading these programs to take industry-friendly approaches to climate change.”
- While some contrarian scientists are academics, several leading contrarians are associated with conservative think tanks and/or host blogs enabling them to reach large audiences. Despite their modest credentials—as determined by the number of journal articles on climate change they’ve published—they receive a disproportionate amount of media coverage relative to mainstream climate scientists.
Government inaction on climate change is a product of deliberate disinformation campaigns by the oil and gas industry coupled with the cupidity of politicians who took their money and voted in favour of the oil and gas interests. And now, in the USA, the oil and gas industry appears to be triumphant. They have their own pet lunatic in charge following the de-regulation playbook generated by the Heritage Foundation in Project 2025.
What about in Canada? This little item from CTV News was published in September 2024:
“a number of executives, including one from a major oil and gas company, attended a Conservative fundraiser advertised as “An Evening with Pierre Poilievre” on April 11, 2023.
The evening cost up to $1,700 per person. The attendee list includes Alexander Pourbaix, executive chair of the board of directors at Cenovus, Adam Waterous, managing partner and CEO of Waterous Energy Fund as well as Jim Riddell, who heads Paramount Resources.
Separate Elections Canada records show that all three men made a donation of $1,600 each to the Conservative Party of Canada the same week.”
I make no accusations, because there is no evidence of a quid pro quo in this fundraising, and fundraisers like this are not at all unusual. But I would like to note that oil executives like these people have deliberately and knowingly deceived the public and co-opted politicians south of the border. It is highly probable that they’d like to gain power north of the border. It is therefore critically important that we continue to have very strict limits on the funding of political parties in Canada.
The Trudeau government has been vocal in their commitment to greenhouse gas reduction. Sadly, they’ve been more vocal than effective. Despite the progress we’ve made, we’re not on target to meet our stated climate goals, and on the Climate Change Performance Index, we’re rated 62nd out of 67 countries included in the index. Not good enough. Consistent with the performance of a great many other nations, but not good enough.
We’re likely to have a federal election soon. It is a popular cliché to say that the main election issue is “the economy, stupid”. Given Donald Trump’s love of tariffs, that prediction is likely to be right. DEI hiring, woke or anti-woke policies, defence build-up, and immigration can all take a back seat. But the climate issue cannot be ignored because it is a major part of the economy issue. In fact, despite Trump’s bluster, I would argue that climate change is the biggest economic issue there is.
The Los Angeles Times published an article on January 12th about the fire insurance coverage of the destroyed homes there. They personalized the issue with the story of a guy whose insurance jumped from $4500 per year to $18000 per year – a nice, neat 400% increase. He decided he couldn’t pay that, took a risk, went uncovered, and later watched his most valuable possession burn. The article says that:
- The state’s largest home insurer, State Farm General, announced in March that it would not renew 30,000 homeowner and condominium policies.
- Chubb and its subsidiaries stopped writing new policies for high-value homes with higher wildfire risk in 2021.
- Allstate has stopped writing new policies in 2022.
- Tokio Marine America Insurance Co. and its subsidiary Trans Pacific Insurance Co. pulled out of the state last year.
Wildfires in California aren’t the only problem for insurance companies. A web-site titled insurance.com posted an article on January 15th of this year, asking “Why are insurance companies leaving Florida?” The answer? “The Florida homeowners insurance market is in crisis, with insurance companies leaving the state, going out of business or choosing not to renew policies in high-risk areas… Those hurricanes are incredibly costly; Hurricane Ian caused $113 billion in damage and Hurricane Helene and Milton caused billions more.”
And the insurance business is just the first order impact. What happens if insurance becomes unavailable or unaffordable? Well, banks aren’t going to provide mortgages on uninsured properties. What happens if it becomes hard to borrow money for homes? The homeless population increases, and housing prices decline. Declining housing prices threaten the foundations of the real estate investment market, which is what precipitated the economic system collapse in 2008.
In Canada, insured losses averaged about $700 million annually between 2001 and 2010. In 2024, insured damages in Canada were $8.5 billion – more than a ten-fold increase. And please note that those are the insured losses only. But those costs are trivial compared to the possible future costs of climate change. At the current rate of CO2 emissions, global warming is expected to exceed 3 degrees. One of the potential impacts of sustained 3 degree increase in global temperature is the near complete melting of the Greenland ice shield, with a sea level increase of 7+ meters. Now, admittedly, that’s a longer term and lower probability impact. But a 7-meter increase in sea level would cause the loss of tens of thousands of square kilometers of inhabited Canadian land and would displace hundreds of thousands of citizens. Would you like to continue to ignore the possibility?
I continue to be disgusted by the tendency of politicians to say that they are going to fight climate change, but “not on the backs of the people”. I would vote for the guy who tells us that fighting climate change is going to be expensive, but we’re going to have to absorb those costs, because who the hell else will pay? If we put those costs onto industry and commerce, they’ll either go out of business or find a way to recover the money. So, climate change? It’s the economy, stupid. Our government must, absolutely must – almost regardless of cost – table an aggressive climate action program.
I urge you all to pay attention to the climate policy positions for each of the parties in upcoming elections. Choose wisely.
7 responses to “Insanity Trumps Climate Science”
Yes, climate change will an important factor in my voting choices next election. Dark times are upon us.
No doubt climate change is a serious problem which is going to come home to roost sooner rather than later. But what should the Federal Government do. Mandate nuclear power? Tax ICE vehicles to force their retirement? (A sure way to lose the next election!) Build low-pollution transportation infrastructure? (Hello heavy deficit financing!) Shut down the Alberta oil and gas industry? (I won’t speculate on the effect of that!) Limit driving to odd days or even days to stimulate ride sharing? Let the Public Service work from home? Invest heavily in Hydrogen cars? (More deficit financing!)
We definitely need a well-developed national program which will address climate change and CO2 production. There does not seem to be much will to take the steps necessary to develop this program and set uit in motion.
Thanks for the comment Terry. The answer to your “what to do” question is likely “most of the above”. No, I wouldn’t tax ICE vehicles. And I wouldn’t shut down the oil and gas industry. But I would sharply increase tax on gasoline to restrict driving and I would regulate the oil and gas industry to force production emissions down, and I would tax their profits to finance some of the measures needed to combat CO2 emissions. I have no sympathy for them. They are complicit in having brought this mess to where it is. Yes we should invest in EV infrastructure and power grid infrastructure, and nuclear power, and we should invest heavily in hydrogen powered vehicles and infrastructure. And yes we need to increase taxes to pay for that. That goes to the route of my complaint that we won’t solve an intractable problem without having the guts to tell the electorate that nothing comes for free. We can help fix it, but it’s going to cost us.
I asm not voting for PP, never, his manners are as disgusting as his lack of policies.
Ig Greenland’s ice diappeaps, PEI is under water.
Here is UPEI take on the Greenland Ice cap
Citation:
Wang, X., Fenech, A., & Farooque,
A. A. (2021). Possibility of stabilizing
the Greenland ice sheet. Earth’s
Future, 9, e2021EF002152. https://doi.
org/10.1029/2021EF002152
Climate change is on my radar.
Keep up the good work, Dennis.
I checked out the UPEI research paper. Just the summary. The bottom line, it seems, is that ”If no effective carbon reduction policies are being taken now, we are very likely to enter a continuous warming pathway and lose the chance of stabilizing the Greenland ice sheet.” And my reading tells me that we do not have effective carbon reduction policies now, and that, therefore we are losing the chance of stabilizing the Greenland ice sheet.
I can’t see myself voting Conservative which is voting for Big Oil and Insurance. To do so would be selling out the future of our children to save myself tax dollars today. Let’s hope the dangerous trend of society favouring far right wing politics and politicians disappears with future generations of voters who may recognize the global danger and start voting for planet and societal health.
Thanks for the comment Doug. Recognizing the global danger is the problem, isn’t it? I still think that people think of this something like a mosquito… An annoying little bastard that won’t go away. But in fact, this bite could be fatal.