Out of the Greenhouse and Into the Madhouse: the Year in Climate Politics

 

 

JEFFREY ST. CLAIR 

025 will go down as the second or third hottest year on record. The last decade has been the hottest decade in human history.  Driven by drought and extreme winds, a massive fire burned its way across the LA Basin, incinerating more than 10,000 homes. The estimated damage ranges from $76 billion to $133 billion. Total losses to businesses and workers in income and wages totaled at least $297. The year saw two of the largest, most rapidly intensifying hurricanes in the history of the Atlantic Ocean. Floods in central Texas killed at least 137 people, while massive flooding driven by twin cyclones that tore across Sumatra and the southern Philippines killed at least 1,800 people and left more than a million people homeless. We are in the midst of the largest mass coral bleaching event in history, affecting 83% of the world’s extant coral reefs. The melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is accelerating. Its surface is fracturing, causing massive ice falls and rockslides that are warping the southern continent’s geology. A total collapse of the ice sheet, which now seems certain, would raise global sea levels by 12 feet. The Arctic Ocean is now expected to be “ice-free” in the summer by 2030, twenty years earlier than predicted just a few years ago. The Atlantic Current is slowing down and may be on the verge of collapse, which would likely destabilize rainfall patterns for much of the planet. Wildfires in Canada now burn year-round. There were 24,000 heat-related deaths in Europe this summer from June to August alone. Deaths from extreme heat in the US have increased by more than 50% since 2000. 

None of these catastrophic events has left the slightest impact on Trump, who has ordered his administration to slash nearly every restraint on the release of CO2 into the atmosphere. Oil drilling has been expanded on federal lands (including the high Arctic) and waters. The dying industry of coal mining has been put on life support with new subsidies and exemptions from environmental regulations, while coal-generating power plants slated for closure have been forced to keep operating. Large-scale renewable energy projects, in the planned for years, have been cancelled and tax credits and incentives for small-scale solar have been gutted. Energy-hogging data centers have been fast-tracked and freed from regulatory constraints.  Prior to Trump’s re-inauguration, Bethany Kozma — who now heads RFK’s Department of Health and Human Services Office of Global Affairs— vowed that the administration “will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere” in government. And they’ve largely followed through gutting NOAA’s Office of Atmospheric Research; the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, National Center for Atmospheric Research,  U.S. Global Change Research program and NASA’s Earth Science program. Climate research stations have been shuttered. References to climate change have been removed from federal websites, documents, databases and signage on federal lands, offices and parks.

And it’s not just Trump. The supposed global protectors of the climate had their annual meeting in Bélem, Brazil this year and likely generated more CO2 coming and going from the confab than they saved during the sessions. That’s in part because they came and went without even mentioning fossil fuels in their final document. These actions go beyond denial and amount to incitement of the wrath of the climate gods. Their vengeance will be a terrible thing to behold. We’ve gone from trying to survive in a global greenhouse into a madhouse.