Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – UC Berkeley scholars warn that “with plans to expand the production of fossil fuels, curtail environmental regulations, dismantle key climate monitoring agencies and even undermine the Endangered Species Act, there is no question that Project 2025 would be disastrous for the climate.”
Project 2025, despite his dishonest denials, is Trump’s plan to gut the U.S. government, developed for the Heritage Foundation by Trump hangers-on.
I have said some of this before. It bears repeating.
Author Mary Annaïse Heglar said on social media, “If you know even a small amount about the fragile state of our ecosystem, you can recognize Donald Trump as an extinction level event.”
The Trump team will significantly raise US carbon dioxide emissions (4.8 billion metric tons in 2023, down from 4.9 billion in 2022), returning us to levels last seen in 2007, when we emitted 6 billion metric tons of CO2. The entire world releases 36.8 billion metric tons of CO2 each year. The US, with just 4.23% of the global population, generates 13% of all carbon dioxide emissions.
The United States is finally making some halting progress toward reducing greenhouse gases. The EPA looked at some 8,000 large industrial facilities, including power plants, and found that emissions were down 4% last year from 2022. This progress is fragile and Trump will overturn it, increasing fossil fuel use and torching the globe.
In Europe, the European Union’s deployment of wind, hydro, solar power, and batteries, along with the shift towards electric vehicles in some nations — coupled with enhanced energy efficiency — resulted in a nearly 9% reduction in total CO2 emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels within the European Union in 2023, despite some economic growth.
Only governments can act on climate change with the scale and speed that is necessary.
The Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act allocated $369 billion for clean energy initiatives and combating climate change. This amount surpasses the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of many nations, including Egypt, Pakistan, Chile, Greece, and others. This outlay represents an enormous lever. As Archimedes famously stated, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to rest it, and I will move the world.”
We have just 26 years to bring the world to carbon neutrality.
26 years.
The celebrated climate scientist Michael E. Mann shows that if we cease burning fossil fuels (petrol, natural gas, coal) by 2050, the planet will immediately stop warming. Additionally, all the hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide we have released into the atmosphere since 1750 will be absorbed by the oceans. Between 65% and 80% of CO2 is taken up by the oceans over a period of 20 to 200 years.
It means that the threat of the planet’s climate going chaotic and threatening human civilization can be averted. The trick is that we must swing into action several times faster than we are presently doing.
Instead, Trump would take us back to the bad old days of ever-increasing emissions.
“Trump Tsunami,” Digital, Dream / Dark Fantasy v3
If we continue releasing billions of metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere beyond 2050, we will exceed the oceans’ capacity to absorb it, and everything, 100% of the emissions we produce after that point, will remain in the atmosphere for centuries. The average rise in the earth’s surface temperature since 1750 could surpass 5.4º F (3º C.), a level that scientists fear could destabilize our climate system.
The shifts in the Earth’s climate that we are already witnessing — including enormous wildfires, extreme heat waves, ocean temperatures surpassing 100º F (37.7º C.), powerful hurricanes, and catastrophic floods — are far more intense than the models predicted at this stage of climate change. These unexpected developments suggest that, in the near future, the climate could become extremely hostile if we fail to change our behavior. What if we are forced to retreat underground due to unbearable surface temperatures? What if all the power lines are destroyed by storms? Society cannot function without electricity. What if all buildings need to be redesigned to withstand winds of 160 miles per hour?
We saw the flash floods inundate Spain’s Valencia over the weekend, when the city suddenly was hit with torrential rains. They killed over 200 people. This sort of very heavy 1-day rainfall event is 12% more intense and 2 times as likely because of the increase we have provoked through burning coal, gas and petroleum, of 1.3º C. / 2.3º F. of the average temperature of the earth’s surface since 1750. Hot air has more moisture in it, so the rainfall is heavier than it used to be.
George Lee at Ireland’s RTE writes that World Weather Attribution, a group of climate scientists, “published an analysis of the ten most deadly extreme weather events of the past 20 years as a result of which more than 570,000 people died. They concluded unequivocally that, yes, human-caused climate change intensified every single one of those most deadly events. Four of those top ten global weather disasters occurred in Europe.”
What can stop the worst of this mounting catastrophe from striking us, our children and grandchildren? Governments. In the industrialized democracies, government policy is set by the parties that win elections.
This year, one political party genuinely seeks to devastate the planet for the short-term selfish gains of a few individuals. The other party is at least partially dedicated to combating climate change and can be further pressured to take stronger action in that direction.
Nothing else matters as much. The war in Ukraine does not matter as much. The US-China confrontation in the South China Sea is not as pressing. The Israeli total war on Gaza civilians, horrific as it is, and Hamas terrorism against civilians, as horrific as that is, does not matter as much as the fate of the globe.
In fact Israel, Gaza and Lebanon are destined to see significant loss of coastline to rising sea levels over the next century (and potentially as early as 2050), with the risk of widespread displacement of populations. There could be 1.2 billion climate refugees in the world by 2050, and these fragile Levantine societies are especially vulnerable.
Powerful Mediterranean cyclones, or Medicanes, similar to the one that swept Libya’s Derna into the sea last year, will strike their towns. Some parts of the Levant will see a decrease in available water of 30% by the end of the century. Intolerable heatwaves will claim the lives of the elderly and children. The region is warming at twice the global average rate. Carnegie concludes of the Middle East, “Heat waves are set to be experienced ten times more frequently by the same year. Future temperatures in the region are projected to exceed a threshold for human adaptability, leading to higher mortality rates for children and the elderly.”
Israelis and Palestinians will not endure unless they lay down their arms and collaborate to adapt to these changes.
In my opinion, the primary responsibility for this shift lies with Israel, which is currently dominated by a far-right ethno-nationalist expansionist agenda, as it is by far the more powerful party. Israeli technological advancements and Palestinian knowledge of traditional agricultural practices will be vital. But we are talking about just a few million people.
What good would it do anyway to win a war in Beirut, Haifa and/ or Gaza City but then have the oceans, cyclones, heat waves and drought come for you and chase you out of them anyway?
Once the Democrats are in power, if you disagree with their policies, challenge them, apply pressure, and push for change. Trump and MAGA, however, are not responsive to grassroots movements. They are controlled by a small group of self-serving billionaires who are determined to put you in the ground and then make you pay to be buried in it.
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