Trump steers brilliant human history to its end

7 0 April 2017

O SOONER had the reality of having the cre-

tinous Donald J Trump as US president begun

to truly sink in than the rationalising began.

All those awful things he said and did were

all really just campaign rhetoric for his hard

core supporters. He’ll pivot to the centre. The system is

bigger than one man. American institutions are strong.

The Republican Party will rein him in. Besides, it can’t

happen here.

Well, it did and it has. While Trump’s staggeringly

clumsy overreach in trying to dismember Obamacare

led to an embarrassing setback, this was a rare bump

in the road to ruin that Trump’s new kleptocracy of bil

lionaire bandits and ideologues have been busy

mapping out.

This cesspit of partisanship stirred up by the Republi

can Party’s takeover by Tea Party extremists incubated

the conditions that would lead to the Grand Old Party

(GOP) whoring itself to a bullying shyster and dema-

gogue with an authoritarian streak.

Just as fungus doesn’t grow and spread on a healthy

tree, the rise of the Trump regime is a symptom of the

diseased state of US politics, rotten across the both

sides of aisle from the poisonous spread of corporate

cash into every nook and crevice of the system. This is

evidenced when you consider that candidates running in

the 2016 federal elections, including the presidential

race, spent almost $7 billion buying their seats.

This contamination has also soured public trust in the

whole political process. A solid majority of Americans

had negative views of both presidential candidates. Only

31% thought the election process itself was satisfactory,

or felt the orgy of spending was justiﬁed.

Anyone planning to run for the US Senate will need a

war chest of no less than $10m per campaign. This stu

pendous outlay ensures democracy is, again, strictly the

preserve of the gilded classes and their corporate

paymasters.

While there are clear limits to what difference any one

president can make, the system was simply never

designed to deal with truly rogue individuals and the

long-term harm they could, if so minded, inﬂict. It takes

little imagination to ﬁgure out that Trump’s clumsy prod-

ding of his stubby middle ﬁnger in the direction of the

equally deranged leadership of the nuclear-armed North

Korea could rapidly escalate into a thermonuclear

conﬂagration.

However, either through blind luck or providence, this

existential bullet may well be dodged, as it was back in

the early 1960s, and again in the 1980s. In a sense,

avoiding a nuclear apocalypse has always been a

straightforward matter of not starting one in the ﬁrst

place. The one catastrophe that is no less fatal to human

civilisation than all-out nuclear war is runaway climate

change. The catch is that for climate change to obliterate

most of life on Earth at some point this century, all we

have to do is…nothing at all.

Under its own carbon-fuelled momentum, the Earth is

already shifting from the long term stability that has

been the hallmark of the 11,000-year recent post-glacial

period known as the Holocene, into a new, dramatically

hotter phase. Scientists have in recent decades been

frantically waving red ﬂags to warn us that the fossil fuel-

powered locomotive comprising all of human civilisation

is careering towards a climate cliff and drastic action is

needed to avert calamity.

Now, however, with Engineer Trump at the controls,

it's full steam ahead and let the devil take the hindmost.

In March 2017 he took the political equivalent of a lump

hammer to both the US Environment Protection Agency

(EPA) and the country’s nascent role as an international

leader on climate action.

Trump’s executive order involves rewriting rules to

reduce CO2 emissions, while lifting a ban on coal leases

on federal lands. He also scrapped the mandate that gov-

ernment officials consider climate impacts in

decision-making. And, in a move that seemed mainly

motivated by sheer spite, he scrapped an Obama era rule

that blocked coal-mining operations from dumping

waste into the very rivers and streams that many poor

Trump voters get their drinking water from.

Trump also approved oil pipelines, removed a raft of

restrictions on of fossil fuels and eliminated planned

increases in federal royalties payable to energy

companies.

Trump steers brilliant

human history to its end

Trump’s rise – and policy on climate change - is a

symptom of diseased, money-driven US politics

Trump is rewriting rules to reduce CO2 emissions,

lifting a ban on coal leases on federal lands,

scrapping the mandate that government ofﬁcials

considerclimate impacts, allowing coal-mining

operations to dump waste into rivers, approved oil

pipelines, removed a raft of restrictions on of fossil

fuels and eliminated planned increases in federal

royalties payable to energy companies

by John Gibbons

ENVIRONMENT

April 2017 7 1

The EPA was instructed to send out a press

release applauding its evisceration by Trump,

but due to what was undoubtedly an unfortunate

technical error, the press statement’s opening

paragraph read as follows: “this Order calls into

question America’s credibility and our commit-

ment to tackling the greatest environmental

challenge of our lifetime. With the world watch-

ing, President Trump and Administrator Pruitt

have chosen to shirk our responsibility, disre-

gard clear science and undo the signiﬁcant

progress our country has made to ensure we

leave a better, more sustainable planet for gen-

erations to come”. Oops.

Trump has also promised to pull the US out

of the Paris Agreement on curbing climate

change. In a quite surreal twist, ExxonMobil,

the world’s largest energy ﬁrm and long-time

supporter of climate denial and disinformation,

actually went public in urging Trump not to

abandon the Paris accord, stating that it was an

"effective framework for addressing the risks

of climate change".

Exxon’s outgoing CEO, Rex Tillerson also

happens to have been appointed by Trump as

his Secretary of State. Tillerson’s chief qualiﬁ

cation for this job appeared to be his close

personal ties with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. In

recent years, Putin has been a solid supporter

of intergovernmental action on addressing cli

mate change. After all, as recently as 2010, a

climate-fuelled heatwave killed around 50,000

Russians.

However, he too has had a Pauline conversion

on this crunch issue. Suddenly, Putin is peddling

long-debunked denier talking points such as:

“climate change may be related to some global

cycles or some greater outer space cycles”. A

mega-deal between ExxonMobil and Rosneft, a

Russian state-owned company worth around

half a trillion dollars was scrapped by the Obama

government as part of its sanctions package

against Russia. As relations between Washing-

ton and Moscow thaw even more quickly than

the Arctic circle, expect to see hydrocarbon real-

politik rear its genocidal head once more.

Incurable optimists are once again emerging

to point out that, after all, Trump can’t really sin

gle-handedly derail the global climate. Twenty,

maybe even 10 years ago, that argument might

have had some currency. Now, however, time

itself is the enemy. There is today precisely zero

chance of keeping global temperature rise below

the +1.5ºC danger mark.

The next major milestone on the road to cli-

mate hell is +2ºC. Being frank, even before

Trump took power, the odds were stacked

against a global decarbonisation effort of the

magnitude and duration required to avert disas-

ter. Ireland, for instance, was given relatively

modest 2020 EU targets of a 20% emissions cut

versus our 2005 levels. What we did instead was

to allow both agricultural and transport emis-

sions to continue to spiral, leading to a piddling

total overall reduction of around 6-8% in a

15-year period, when in reality we need to be

decarbonising at that rate every year until we are

at zero net carbon.

It's an enjoyable parlour game to blame Trump

and his zealots for this unfolding tragedy, but in

reality, Ireland has civil servants, economists,

politicians and lobbyists, all decent, ethical

people, no doubt, but all working tirelessly to

burn down our shared future, in the name of

squeezing the last few bob out of this broken

economic and political system that has taken us

to the very abyss.

We now live in a world in which a rogue admin-

istration in Washington is atavistically torching

even the most uncontroversial efforts at decar

bonising energy systems; this is a world

plunging squarely to smash through the +2ºC

tipping point by as early as 2030. Trump will hold

power until early 2021, and will quite possibly be

still on the throne until January 2025.

By either of those dates, our fate as a species

will have been sealed; all that remains to be seen

is just how quickly the bodies begin to pile up as

a rapidly destabilising climate system destroys

global food and industrial production, while

dragging already highly stressed and degraded

natural land and marine ecosystems into full-

scale collapse, thus sealing off any possible

escape route.

Trump and his acolytes may yet escape the

judgement of history, if for no other reason than

that human history will probably have run its

brilliant, violent course within a generation or

two.

In a surreal twist,

ExxonMobil actually

went public in urging

Trump not to abandon

the Paris accord as

it was an ‘effective

framework’