Far from making America great again, Donald Trump may in fact threaten human civilization by setting in motion runaway climate change beyond the capacity of civilization to cope.
The trickiest concept about climate change is the lag time between cause and effect, whereby we won’t see the worst of the impacts from our current behavior for many decades.
The science indicates that what we do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the next few years is crucial, and if we don’t start acting decisively now, disaster awaits.
But what we will see of those impacts in the next few years, substantial as they may be, will pale in comparison to what’s to come a generation or two down the line.
Our president has called climate change a “hoax” and threatens to “cancel” the historic Paris climate accords and unleash a bonanza of oil and coal extraction that would dwarf the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines.
He has murmured about being “good stewards,” but his Cabinet nominations are down-the-line “climate skeptics” who risk turning the clock back to a place where we can’t afford to go.
Their proposed deregulation plans would discount the future and expose future generations to untold misery, undoing the substantial progress America has made toward a booming clean-energy economy, which truly would make America great again.
Tell Trump and the U.S. Senate that we need a leadership team that will carry us forward to this future, not send us backward.
For more information, go to www.olyclimate.org.
Ed Chadd,
Port Angeles
EDITOR’S NOTE: Ed Chadd is on the executive committee of Port Angeles-based Olympic Climate Action.