Trump: So Wrong In So Many Ways June 6, 2016June 4, 2016 I agree totally with Bernie: whichever of them gets the nomination, Trump must be defeated; loved Hillary’s “national security address” (theme: Trump is a huge threat to our national security); love clips of Republicans labeling Trump “a con artist” (Marco Rubio), “a phony” (Mitt Romney), “a complete idiot” (Karl Rove); and commend to you this Lawrence O’Donnell segment defining “pathological liar.” (The term apparently dates from 1891.) In it, Jon Favreau asks, “Right now, Trump’s targeting people with his big mouth and his twitter account; but what happens if he becomes President and he has at his disposal the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, and America’s nuclear arsenal?” What indeed. Meanwhile, you saw Paul Krugman in Friday’s New York Times? . . . The outlook for climate change if current policies continue has never looked worse, but the prospects for turning away from the path of destruction have never looked better. Everything depends on who ends up sitting in the White House for the next few years. . . . [T]errible things are in prospect, but can be avoided with fairly modest, politically feasible steps. You may want a revolution, but we don’t need one to save the planet. Right now all it would take is for America to implement the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan and other actions — which don’t even require new legislation, just a Supreme Court that won’t stand in their way — to let the U.S. continue the role it took in last year’s Paris agreement, guiding the world as a whole toward sharp reductions in emissions. But what happens if the next president is a man who doesn’t believe in climate science, or indeed in inconvenient facts of any kind? . . . . . . No doubt Donald Trump hates environmental protection in part for the usual reasons. But there’s an extra layer of venom to his pro-pollution stances that is both personal and mind-bogglingly petty. For example, he has repeatedly denounced restrictions intended to protect the ozone layer — one of the great success stories of global environmental policy — because, he claims, they’re the reason his hair spray doesn’t work as well as it used to. I am not making this up. He’s also a bitter foe of wind power. He likes to talk about how wind turbines kill birds, which they sometimes do, but no more so than tall buildings; but his real motivation seems to be ire over unsuccessful attempts to block an offshore wind farm near one of his British golf courses. . . . The same people who for decades muddied the waters on tobacco — read Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming or watch the movie — have persuaded the Republican House and Senate science committee chairs that climate change is a hoax. Trump, who once tweeted, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive,” does not seem to be the man to persuade them otherwise. Trump: So Wrong . . . In So Many Ways
But what happens if the next president is a man who doesn’t believe in climate science, or indeed in inconvenient facts of any kind? . . . . . . No doubt Donald Trump hates environmental protection in part for the usual reasons. But there’s an extra layer of venom to his pro-pollution stances that is both personal and mind-bogglingly petty. For example, he has repeatedly denounced restrictions intended to protect the ozone layer — one of the great success stories of global environmental policy — because, he claims, they’re the reason his hair spray doesn’t work as well as it used to. I am not making this up. He’s also a bitter foe of wind power. He likes to talk about how wind turbines kill birds, which they sometimes do, but no more so than tall buildings; but his real motivation seems to be ire over unsuccessful attempts to block an offshore wind farm near one of his British golf courses. . . .