Trump’s Climate Plan: Add Fuel to the Fire; Earth First – Defend the Planet at all costs!

Wednesday, 23 November 2016 00:00By Dahr Jamail, Truthout | Report

With 2016 now locked in to be the hottest year ever recorded, easily surpassing the previous hottest year on record, which was last year, the need for dramatic government intervention aimed at lessening impacts of anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) is paramount.

Yet, President-elect Donald Trump couldn’t be a worse person to lead the United States, given that he has called ACD “bullshit” and a “hoax” and is reportedly already working to remove the US from the Paris Agreement on climate change.

“We’re going to cancel the Paris climate agreement and stop all payment of US tax dollars to UN global warming programs,” Trump said in North Dakota earlier this year.

While we still don’t know what other actions he plans to take regarding ACD, but one of his first alarming actions after winning the election was naming Myron Ebell, a man well-known for his coal industry-funded attacks on climate science, to lead his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition team — and possibly head the EPA.

Ebell is also extremely well known for his ACD denial: He is the chairman of the Cooler Heads Coalition, a group of nonprofit organizations that “question global warming alarmism and oppose energy-rationing policies.”

 

 

For more original Truthout election coverage, check out our election section, “Beyond the Sound Bites: Election 2016.”

“There has been a little bit of warming,” Ebell told Vanity Fair in 2007, “but it’s been very modest and well within the range for natural variability, and whether it’s caused by human beings or not, it’s nothing to worry about.”

However, ACD denial is just the beginning of Trump’s threat to the planet.

“While Trump campaigned as a political outsider, his transition team is filled with corporate lobbyists,” Wenonah Hauter, the executive director of Food and Water Watch said in a recent press release. “His agriculture advisors are agribusiness insiders. He has called climate change a hoax, and his energy advisor is a lobbyist for the Koch Brothers. His reported top pick for energy secretary is Harold Hamm, a modern-day oil tycoon.”

As recently as the end of October, during a campaign stop in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Trump laid out what his campaign deemed the “100-day plan to Make America Great Again,” within which he promised during his “first day in office” to, among other things, allow the Keystone XL pipeline to move forward, lift restrictions on fossil fuel production and cancel “billions in payments to UN climate change programs.”

His election has alarmed scientists around the globe.

“Trump will be the first anti-science president we have ever had,” Michael Lubell, director of public affairs for the American Physical Society in Washington DC told the media recently. “The consequences are going to be very, very severe.”

Hauter of Food and Water Watch told Truthout she believes we are at a point where, literally, everything is at stake.

“We are at a pivotal point in the Earth’s history, and we needed a leader who would prioritize our environment and promote policies that would incentivize energy efficiency and renewable energy,” she said. “Instead, we have elected a climate denier who will give the fossil fuel industry free reign, threatening the future of life on Earth.”

Moreover, the people with which Trump is surrounding himself regarding environmental policy indicate that if his administration’s plans are implemented, it will mean full speed ahead for ACD.

 

 

A Fossil Fuel Utopia

Trump’s shortlist for secretary of the Interior Department includes Sarah Palin. The Department of Interior (DOI) is responsible for managing federal lands and the country’s natural resources, as well as dealing with the land rights of Native Americans and making decisions about both fracking and offshore drilling.

While everyone remembers Palin’s famous “drill baby drill” campaign, her more recent comments on oil and gas production have been less publicized. Last year, when Donald Trump floated the idea of including Palin in his prospective administration, she expressed interest in heading the Department of Energy (DOE).

To see more stories like this, visit “Planet or Profit?”

“Energy is my baby,” Palin said. “Oil, gas, minerals, those things God has dumped on this part of the earth for mankind’s use instead of us relying on unfriendly foreign nations for us to import their resources. If I were head of that, I’d get rid of it.”

Of course, oil and gas resource extraction is mainly under the purview of the DOI (not the Department of Energy). Palin’s comments do not bode well for an Interior Secretary appointment.

Another person on Trump’s shortlist for the DOI is Forrest Lucas, an oil industry executive and head of Lucas Oil. The NFL’s Indianapolis Colts play their home games in Lucas Oil Stadium, since Lucas paid over $100 million to have the stadium named after him a decade ago.

It should be noted as well that the current DOI Secretary, appointed by Barack Obama, is former Mobile Oil executive Sally Jewell.

Trump has chosen Mike McKenna, a fossil fuel lobbyist, to lead the transition at the DOE, meaning McKenna is on the top of the shortlist to head the department.

According to the Washington Post, McKenna has lobbied on behalf of MWR Strategies, a firm that is owned by the Koch Brothers, which was listed by Forbes as one of the largest private companies in the US. McKenna has also represented Dow Chemical and the energy firm EDF Suez, which holds fracking licenses in the UK.

Another person who Trump might tap for DOE secretary is Harold Hamm, a billionaire who is the CEO of Oklahoma-based Continental Resources, a fracking company. If chosen, Hamm would be the first person taken directly from the fossil fuel industry and placed in a cabinet position since 1977, and his company runs most of the Bakken shale formation drilling in North Dakota. Hamm has already called for Trump to abandon what he referred to as “overreaching regulations” in an effort to ramp up fossil fuel production.

During the presidential campaign, Hamm stated that Trump did not fully “understand” oil and gas issues after Trump said that local communities should have a say in whether or not fracking should be allowed where they live.

“Harold Hamm and Forrest Lucas are two oil industry tycoons whose names have been floated,” Hauter told Truthout of these two members of Trump’s shortlist. “They would be particularly bad, but none of the names inspire any confidence that our public lands will be protected from extractive industries, every indication is that the Trump administration will see them as a source of profit, not a resource to be protected.”…………read more;

Source: Trump’s Climate Plan: Add Fuel to the Fire

 

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