7 0 April 2017
N
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