The White House Hopes You Were Too Busy Shopping to Hear About Its Horrifying Climate Change Report
On Wednesday, while coastal communities were still rebuilding from hurricanes, and while the death toll from ongoing California wildfires was still rising, Donald Trump whined about climate change and sudden cold weather in the northeast, tweeting, "Whatever happened to Global Warming?"
He got an answer from his own administration two days later. On the afternoon of Black Friday, a major report from 13 federal agencies was released that described the monumental damage the United States faces from climate change. In more than 1000 pages, the report contradicts nearly every assertion the president has made about climate change and the rationale for almost all of his environmental policies.
Trump has defended his aggressive deregulation by saying it will spur economic growth, and that may be true in the short-term since following environmental regulations cuts into companies' profits. But this report predicts that the ravages of climate change—from worsening pollution to faltering agriculture to wrecked infrastructure—will knock down the U.S. economy by as much as 10 percent, and will likely cost the country "$141 billion from heat-related deaths, $118 billion from sea level rise and $32 billion from infrastructure damage by the end of the century, among others." Per the New York Times:
But in direct language, the 1,656-page assessment lays out the devastating effects of a changing climate on the economy, health and environment, including record wildfires in California, crop failures in the Midwest and crumbling infrastructure in the South. Going forward, American exports and supply chains could be disrupted, agricultural yields could fall to 1980s levels by midcentury and fire season could spread to the Southeast, the report finds.
“There is a bizarre contrast between this report, which is being released by this administration, and this administration’s own policies,” said Philip B. Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research Center.
All told, the report says, climate change could slash up to a tenth of gross domestic product by 2100, more than double the losses of the Great Recession a decade ago.
The report, which is required by law to come out every four years, lays out that damages are "intensifying across the country," and, like the U.N.'s own climate change report from October, finds that we have an extremely narrow window to prevent only the worst effects. And it concludes that countries like the U.S., Canada, and Mexico can continue to grow their economies even while they scale back greenhouse gas emissions.
While scientists tell the New York Times that there's no evidence that the administration tried to tamper with the report's findings, it's extremely suspect that it was released in the afternoon on the day after Thanksgiving, a time when few people are likely to pay attention to news. White House spokespeople have been trying to spin the report as not that big a deal, claiming, wrongly, that it's only based on the most extreme scenarios.
Trump's underlings may have been hoping that no one would notice the report if they timed it right, but, if so, they underestimated how much people care about a genuinely preventable apocalypse.
