Trump: climate optimist or pessimist?

Posted

Donald Trump is an optimist. While he believes America is crippled, with 42 percent unemployment (if that were the case, we would have riots in the streets every day, to say the least), he is publicly an optimist on one issue – he believes there is absolutely nothing wrong with our environment. There is no drought in California. Climate change isn’t actually happening. 

His pronouncements are consistent with Republican Party ideology, which believes that unregulated free markets can solve every problem society faces. If only government regulation were stowed in a closest, businesses could operate freely and all will be well. 

Climate change can’t be happening because it is inconsistent with an ideology that says unregulated free markets deliver the greatest good for society. If free markets are harming the environment that we depend on for life, it puts a huge dent in this ideology’s rationale. 

This ideology about unregulated free markets has helped give us the climate change the Republican Party establishment so vehemently denies. There has never been meaningful national legislation to address climate change in the U.S., such as a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system.  President Obama has made some attempts to reduce the rate of climate change, but his hands have mostly been tied by a Republican Congress and lawsuits from special interest groups.

Trump has said that when he is president, he will scrap the Paris Accord that commits the U.S. to reducing carbon pollution. He plans to let industry burn oil, gas and coal all it wants, so America can be great again. 

And yet, there is a small, yet significant, contradiction to Trump’s professed optimism. His own golf course operation in Ireland has applied to the government there to build a sea wall to protect his resort from rising seas and erosion due to climate change (as Politico reported on May 23). So when it comes to the practical matter of protecting his own business, Trump believes climate change is actually happening. 

This attitude is a mirror of Republican ideology as well. Trump is trying to take measures to protect himself, because he has the means, but the rest of us, who do not have his resources, will be left to shift for ourselves. 

No question, capitalism has brought huge benefits to the world, but to be clear-eyed and realistic, it has also damaged the stability of a climate system that has allowed humankind to survive and thrive for the 10,000 years since the last ice age. 

To refuse to acknowledge this fact is to willfully blind ourselves to the massive, multi-year drought in California, the vast graveyards of dead forests in the West, record-breaking heat records every year, melting ice sheets in Greenland and at both poles, and the resulting rising seas that threaten our coastal cities, from Miami to New York. 

Right out of college, I worked in the private sector for 20 years. I learned how hard it was to scrap to make a profit.  The companies I worked for had to serve customers well, pay the bills, cut checks for employees, pay taxes and provide a good return on investment.  

Government regulations may seem like a nuisance or more to any given business, but doesn’t business have a responsibility to the public beyond its customer base and investors? Businesses dramatically affect the common resources we all share. If a given business doesn’t take responsibility for the public, then the government has to do it.

If Trump needs help to protect his golf course from climate change, then we all do. 

Mike Gold lives and works in the Bronx. ‘Points of view’ is a column open to all readers.

Comments