PRESIDENT TRUMP THREATENS GENERAL MOTORS & DENIES CLIMATE CHANGE

…Massive Southern California fires are blamed on climate change

President Trump says about Climate change, “I don’t see it”.  

I sure hope that those voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio, that voted for Donald J. Trump in 2016, are thinking about that vote and who they will be voting for in 2020.

Just consider what our president has said about the nation’s economy and about climate change, not to mention his praise of Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

First, Trump is ignoring the fact that the auto industry, which is a key indicator of the US economy, that industry overall today is down by 1 million cars, when compared to 2017.  In addition, the latest GM announcement of 5 US plant closures in those Rust Belt states that I mentioned above, will also include the job losses of almost 15,000 American workers.

Because Trump has been lying about more factories were coming back to the United States, because of GM's announcement of plant closures, Trump is threatening to remove any of GM's government subsidies for all-electric and hybrid automobiles.

All of this, while Trump is still giving us his bogus claim that he is leading a “Renaissance for industrial America”.  What a bunch of Bull!

But it’s even worse on his comments against climate change. 

First, it must be noted that in Trump’s own government analysis report, they found that climate change poses a severe threat to the health of all Americans, and to the nation’s infrastructure, economy and natural resources.  The findings were singular, urgent and alarming, they are also at total odds with the Trump administration’s rollback of environmental regulations and the absence of any climate action policy.

Here are some actual quotes on climate change from the president: 

“One of the problems that a lot of people like myself, we have very high levels of intelligence but we’re not necessarily such believers,” Trump said this during a 20-minute Oval Office interview with The Washington Post in which he was asked why he was skeptical of the dire National Climate Assessment his own administration released on Black Friday.

“As to whether or not it’s man-made and whether or not the effects that you’re talking about are there, I don’t see it,” he added.

“You look at our air and our water and it’s right now it’s at a record clean. But when you look at China and you look at parts of Asia and you look at South America, and when you look at many other places in this world, including Russia, including many other places, the air is incredibly dirty, and when you’re talking about an atmosphere, oceans are very small,” 

Trump said this in an apparent reference to pollution around the globe. “And it blows over and it sails over. I mean we take thousands of tons of garbage off our beaches all the time that comes over from Asia. It just flows right down the Pacific. It flows and we say, ‘Where does this come from?’ And it takes many people, to start off with.”

This man totally ignores the fact that the United States has always been the leader in the areas of environmental regulations and climate policy.  Since he was elected, he has scoffed at many of those issues and he has cancelled many of the regulations that keep our air clean and water pure.  Other nations were beginning to follow the lead of the United States in dealing with their own emissions.  Now they are backing off because of what Trump is doing in the US.

With the president totally poo-pooing climate change as a hoax, he is telling the rest of the world, “You don’t need to do anything because it’s all a hoax, and it will eventually go back to what it was before.”  The president has actually said a version of this more than once at his large campaign rallies.

The Trump administration had released this long-awaited report that said that climate change impacts "are intensifying across the country."  But this report was released on Black Friday on purpose, only in order to lessen the effect of possible public outrage against Trump’s attitude of climate change being a “hoax”.

Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, struggled to find a response to the president’s comments. “How can one possibly respond to this?” Dessler said as he called the president’s comments “idiotic”.  He said that Trump’s main motivation seemed to be to attack the environmental policies of the Obama administration and to criticizing political adversaries.

In his comments, Trump also seemed to invoke a theme that is common in the world of climate-change skepticism.  The idea that not so long ago, scientists feared global cooling, rather than the warming that is underway today.

“If you go back and if you look at old articles, they talk about global freezing,” Trump said. “They talk about at some point, the planet is going to freeze to death, but today it’s going to die of heat exhaustion.”

These were some of the attitudes and comments that were made back in the 1970’s.  Today, the scientists’ have a much better understanding of where the planet's environment is headed, and the consequences is far more developed now than it was back then in the 60’s and 70’s.  (Trump has previously admitted that his true beliefs were developed back in the 60’s and 70’s.)

At present, the Earth has in fact warmed roughly one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) above late-19th-century, pre-industrial levels.

Multiple analyses have shown that without rapid emissions cuts, well beyond what the world is undertaking, the warming will continue and could blow past the key thresholds that scientists say could lead to "non-correctable climate-related disasters".  That includes more-extreme weather, the death of the coral reefs and losses of major parts of planetary ice sheets which is already causing the sea levels to increase.  The world has already seen the losses of some small islands and fishing villages due to increasing sea levels.

Trump also made reference to recent devastating wildfires in California, which scientists say that the droughts “have made the wildfires ‘more intense and deadly’, and it's all due to climate change”.  

But of course, our brilliant president focused on how the forests that have burned lately have been improperly managed.  (He ignores the fact that due to former & current droughts, there have been 50% more brush and forest fires in California, all due to climate change.)  Previously, he has praised Finland for spending “a lot of time on raking, sweeping and cleaning” its forest floors.  When the Finnish prime minister was asked about Trump’s comments, he was totally bewildered.  He stated, that yes, they are good at removing dead trees and natural debris, but “we do not sweep the forest floors”.

“The fire in California, where I was, if you looked at the floor, the floor of the fire, they have trees that were fallen,” Trump said. “They did no forest management, no forest maintenance, and you can light …you can take a match like this and light a tree trunk when that thing is laying there for more than 14 or 15 months. And it’s a massive problem in California.”

“You go to other places where they have denser trees, it’s more dense, where the trees are more flammable, they don’t have forest fires like this because they maintain,” he said. “And it was very interesting I was watching the firemen, and they were raking brush. . . . It’s on fire. They’re raking it, working so hard. If that was raked in the beginning, there would be nothing to catch on fire.” 

Of course, as usual, the president didn’t happen to acknowledge that the majority of what he refers to as the “mis-managed forests”, those forests are today run by the Federal Government.  So that ball is in the President’s court, not the states.

Trump wasn’t the only administration official on Tuesday to shrug off the federal government’s latest climate warnings. In a television appearance in California, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke acknowledged that fire seasons have grown longer in the state but added, “Climate change or not, it doesn’t relieve you of responsibility to manage the forest.”

Of course, Sec. Zinke did not refer his management remarks to the president and his federal forests.

Meanwhile, when asked about the findings of the nearly 1,700-page climate report the administration released on Black Friday, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders of course just echoed her boss.

“We think that this is the most extreme version and it’s not based on facts,” Sanders said of the National Climate Assessment. “It’s not data-driven. We’d like to see something that is more data-driven. It’s based on modeling, which is extremely hard to do when you’re talking about the climate. Again, our focus is on making sure we have the safest, cleanest air and water.”  (Her statement on “based on modeling” is not true.)

Oh, and as to the president’s praise of Vladimir Putin, Trump has again repeated his comment that Putin was a better leader than was US President Obama.

Oh, 2020, please get here soon.

Copyright G. Ater 2018