Harrop: Trump can ignore climate crisis; he won’t be here for it

By Froma Harrop / Creators.com

May we talk about spiritual matters? “In the beginning,” the Bible opens, “God created the heavens and the earth.” Several lines down, God says, let humankind “have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”

We humans were given stewardship of earth, but global warming is remaking the world beneath us. We are the cause, but we still have the power to stop or at least greatly slow the desecration of what was placed in our care.

I’ve written at length about the economic damage global warming can inflict, knowing that money arguments often get more traction than ethical ones. But the moral urgency of this crisis deserves far more attention than it receives. However we define conscience, within traditional religion or outside it, protecting the environment for future generations is a moral imperative.

In the world of Donald Trump, dollars outrank soul. His Environmental Protection Agency has just revoked the 2009 “endangerment finding,” which allows the government to regulate planet-warming pollution. In sum, he has just taken the United States out of the race to preserve the Creation.

“The U.S. no longer has emission standards of any meaning,” a former EPA emissions regulator said. “Nothing. Zero.”

Age 79, Trump likely won’t be around to see the worst of what’s coming. But he can make plenty of money in the meantime championing the fossil fuels that heat the atmosphere. And he’s not just promoting them; he’s smothering their competition.

For starters, he’s sabotaging the production of American electric vehicles, for which U.S. automakers will pay the price. This is a gift to China, which is dominating world production of EVs, as the world shifts to electrical vehicles.

Trump has also frozen or slowed offshore wind energy projects. (He ludicrously suggests that turbine noise causes cancer.) He’s also targeted onshore wind, which now produces some of America’s cheapest electricity. A recent Lazard cost-of-energy comparison found that “utility-scale solar and onshore wind remain the most cost-effective forms of new-build energy generation,” even when unsubsidized.

The Edison Electric Institute, which lobbies for investor-owned utilities, said scrapping federal rules on power-plant carbon emissions would hurt the sector’s growth. And just as the industry is expanding to meet the ravenous power demands of artificial intelligence.

Trump’s EPA has gone beyond making false claims about the costs of green energy. It perversely started zeroing out the public-health savings its own analyses credited to banning two pollutants. Fewer cases of asthma, cardiovascular disease and brain-development problems don’t just spare people suffering. They spare the country enormous medical costs.

I’m not indicting the oil and gas industry, which has been around long before we knew what CO2 would do. Civilization still relies on some of its products. But we shouldn’t tolerate efforts to slam the brakes on the move to clean energy; especially when even major oil companies have made substantial investments in renewables that they view as central to their future.

Back at the beginning, in the Book of Genesis, we read that when humanity corrupted the world with sin, God destroyed his Creation by unleashing the great flood. But he does save the righteous Noah and the animals Noah brings onto his Ark. (The story also appears in the Quran, which treats Noah as a prophet warning his people.)

When the waters recede, God says to Noah, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.” Noah becomes a farmer and plants a vineyard.

Humankind, if it refuses to act as a responsible steward, may not get a second chance.