In Visiting a Charred California, Trump Confronts
a Scientific Reality He Denies
A president who has mocked climate change and pushed
policies that accelerate it is set to be briefed on the scorched earth and
ash-filled skies that experts say are the predictable result.
President Trump has used his time in the nation’s
highest office to aggressively promote the burning of fossil fuels, chiefly by
rolling back or weakening every major federal policy intended to combat
dangerous emissions.
Michael D.
ShearCoral Davenport
By Michael
D. Shear and Coral Davenport
Sept. 13,
2020
WASHINGTON
— When President Trump flies to California on Monday to assess the state’s
raging forest fires, he will come face to face with the grim consequences of a
reality he has stubbornly refused to accept: the devastating effects of a
warming planet.
To the
global scientific community, the acres of scorched earth and ash-filled skies
across the American West are the tragic, but predictable, result of
accelerating climate change. Nearly two years ago, federal government
scientists concluded that greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels
could triple the frequency of severe fires across the Western states.
But the
president has used his time in the nation’s highest office to aggressively
promote the burning of fossil fuels, chiefly by rolling back or weakening every
major federal policy intended to combat dangerous emissions. At the same time,
Mr. Trump and his senior environmental officials have regularly mocked, denied
or minimized the established science of human-caused climate change.
Now, as he
battles for a second term in the White House, Mr. Trump has doubled down on his
anti-climate agenda as a way of appealing to his core supporters. At a rally in
Pennsylvania last month, he blamed California’s failure to “clean your floors”
of leaves, threatening to “make them pay for it because they don’t listen to
us.”
The lethal
fires spreading across the West — like the coronavirus that has ravaged the
country for months — are a warning for the president that many voters may hold
him and his administration accountable for brushing aside scientific experts
and failing to effectively mobilize the government to minimize natural
disasters that have claimed lives, damaged property and threatened economic
prosperity.
“Talk to a
firefighter if you think that climate change isn’t real,” Mayor Eric M.
Garcetti of Los Angeles, a supporter of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden
Jr., Mr. Trump’s Democratic opponent, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on
Sunday. “It seems like this administration are the last vestiges of the Flat
Earth Society of this generation.”
Mr. Trump’s
climate record is far more aggressive than the laissez-faire environmental
policy promoted for years by business interests in his party. Indeed, as he has
sought to zealously roll back regulations, even some of the world’s largest oil
companies and automakers have opposed the moves, saying that they will lead to
years of legal uncertainty that could actually harm their bottom lines.
“As an
historic figure, he is one of the most culpable men in America contributing to
the suffering and death that is now occurring through climate-related tragedy,”
Jerry Brown, the former California governor who made climate change his signature
issue, said in an interview on Sunday, though he was careful not to blame Mr.
Trump specifically for the fires ravaging his state.
The
president’s record is also more consequential, experts say, because the amount
of planet-warming carbon dioxide trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere has now
passed the point at which scientists say it would be possible to avert many of
the worst effects of global warming — even if tough emissions policies are
later enacted.
Mr. Biden’s
presidential campaign is hoping to use Mr. Trump’s climate positions as a
cudgel against him with independents and moderate Republicans. Christine Todd
Whitman, the Republican former governor of New Jersey, is backing Mr. Biden’s
candidacy in large part because of the president’s environmental policies.
“It’s
mind-boggling, the ignorance that he displays on this subject,” Ms. Whitman
said in an interview on Sunday. “He doesn’t understand climate change. He
doesn’t particularly believe in science. It’s all about him and his
re-election.”
“He doesn’t
govern for all Americans,” she said.
On
Saturday, Mr. Trump abruptly added the trip to McClellan Park, Calif., near
Sacramento, to be briefed on the fires to an already scheduled West Coast
fund-raising and campaign swing. He had come under intense criticism for weeks
of silence on the increasingly deadly blazes that are consuming parts of
California, Oregon and Washington — three Democratic-led states that he has
feuded with for years.
White House
officials noted that Mr. Trump had signed an executive order in 2018 to
minimize the risk of wildfires and urged California and other states to improve
forest management.
“Other
countries around the world are obsessed with the Paris climate accord, which
shackles economies and has done nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and
those on the radical left are pushing the Green New Deal, which would outlaw
cows, cars and planes,” said Judd Deere, a White House spokesman. He said Mr.
Trump had put in place “common sense policies that have kept our air, water and
environment clean.”
But the
president has often treated climate change and the environment as a deeply
partisan issue, not unlike his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and the
recent racial upheaval in some cities, in which he has frequently lashed out at
Democratic officials while praising the actions of Republicans.
In Florida
last week, Mr. Trump extended a ban on offshore oil drilling supported by the
Republican governor in a key election-year state, even though he has refused to
do the same for Democratic-led states in the Northeast.
At the
event in front of supporters in Jupiter, Fla., Mr. Trump declared himself “a
great environmentalist.”
In fact,
Mr. Trump has repeatedly mocked the science of climate change since long before
he ran for president. In 2012, he tweeted: “In the 1920’s people were worried
about global cooling — it never happened. Now it’s global warming. Give me a
break!” He also tweeted that the concept of climate change “was created by and
for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”
The
president has continued to take a dim view of climate science throughout his
tenure, even as the government he oversees has reinforced the accepted threats
to the future of the planet.
In 2017 and
2018, the federal government published a sweeping, two-volume scientific
report, the National Climate Assessment, that represents the most authoritative
and comprehensive conclusions to date about the causes and effects of climate
change in the United States.
The report
is clear about the causes — burning fossil fuels — and the effects: It found
that the increased drought, flooding, storms and worsening wildfires caused by
the warming planet could shrink the American economy by up to 10 percent by the
end of the century.
Two days
before the White House published the 2018 volume of that report, Mr. Trump
mockingly tweeted, “Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS —
Whatever happened to Global Warming?”
In an
interview a month before, he said of global warming, “I don’t know that it’s
man-made,” and suggested that even as the planet warmed, “it will change back
again” — an idea scientists have long debunked.
Mr. Trump
has also stocked his administration with senior officials who have openly
questioned the basic science of climate change. The National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, which conducts scientific research on climate
change, this year hired as a deputy assistant secretary David Legates, a
scientist at the University of Delaware who has questioned human-caused global
warming. The hiring of Mr. Legates was first reported by NPR.
William
Happer, a former senior White House adviser and a Princeton physicist who had
gained notoriety in the scientific community for statements that carbon dioxide
was beneficial to humanity, began an effort last year to ensure that the next
National Climate Assessment did not include worst-case scenarios. Although Mr.
Happer left the White House last year, that effort is continuing, according to
three people familiar with the matter.
And Mr.
Trump’s first appointee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott
Pruitt, declared early in his tenure that carbon dioxide was not a primary
contributor to global warming, a statement starkly at odds with the scientific
consensus.
“It’s
interesting to draw the parallels between Covid and climate change,” said
Philip B. Duffy, the president of the Woodwell Climate Research Center, who
served on the National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed the National
Climate Assessment. “In both of those cases, Trump personally has refused to
recognize the threat.”
“In both
cases, there is no plan to deal with crisis,” he added.
Moreover,
Mr. Trump has steadily dismantled the climate change plan that was already in
place by effectively gutting the federal government’s authority to do anything
to lower greenhouse gas pollution.
“We had at
the end of the Obama administration the first-ever federalwide regulatory
regime on climate,” said David G. Victor, the director of the Laboratory on
International Law and Regulation at the University of California, San Diego.
“Most of that, the Trump administration has actively rolled back.”
In his
first months in office, Mr. Trump announced that he would withdraw the United
States from the 2015 Paris climate accord, under which nearly every country in
the world had pledged to reduce emissions of planet-warming pollution.
Domestically,
Mr. Trump directed Andrew Wheeler, the current head of the Environmental
Protection Agency, to dismantle a suite of major climate change regulations put
in place by the Obama administration, which had been designed to target
pollution from the nation’s three largest sources of greenhouse emissions:
coal-fired power plants, auto tailpipes and oil and gas drilling sites. Taken
together, those rules represented the country’s first significant step toward
reducing greenhouse gases, while putting the world’s largest economy at the
forefront of the global effort to fight climate change.
Now they
are in shambles.
In August,
the E.P.A. completed the legal process of rolling back rules on methane, a
powerful climate-warming gas emitted from leaks and flares in oil and gas wells.
In April, it completed its rollback of the rules on tailpipe greenhouse
pollution. And in June 2019, it replaced the Obama-era rule requiring coal
plants to reduce emissions with a new rule devised to allow the plants to
continue to release far more pollution.
If Mr.
Biden is elected, he has vowed to rejoin the Paris agreement and reinstate
those rules, while pushing to enact even stronger policies, spending up to $2
trillion to promote the development of renewable energy sources such as wind
and solar.
But experts
said it may take far more than that to rebuild the American climate change
legacy — or its ability to persuade other governments to take similar action.
That is a profound consequence, the experts said, because climate change is a
global problem and cannot be meaningfully mitigated unless the world’s largest
polluters all work in concert.
“The really
big effect of what Trump has done is to send a message to the rest of the world
that the United States is not credible on climate change,” said Mr. Victor of
the University of California, San Diego. “The rest of the world is not going to
know if we’re serious because we keep swinging back and forth.”
“Over the
past 50 years, the effectiveness in creating international deals came from U.S.
leadership,” he added. “And now nobody knows if we’re going to do that
anymore.”
Adam
Nagourney contributed reporting from Los Angeles.
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