They Paved Paradise and Put Up a Parking Lot

The Dow is over 26,000.  The last quarterly economic growth rate was 4.1%. The last monthly unemployment rate was only 3.9%.  Median family income is over $62,000 – an all-time high.  

Liberals need to acknowledge that these are strong numbers.   Trump supporters need to acknowledge how amazing it is for a President to preside over that kind of economy and yet still have an approval rating of only 36%.   Maybe Americans are crazy.  Or maybe sane Americans care about things other than aggregate economic numbers.  In fact, maybe the sanest Americans of all are the ones who care about the environment.

In 2015, representatives of nearly 200 countries negotiated the Paris Accords on Climate Change.  Those Accords go into effect in 2020.  The Accords followed the effort of the United States Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), an international treaty that went into effect in 1994.  Nearly 200 countries have signed onto the UNFCCC, including the United States.   Of those countries, however, only one is poised to reject the Paris Accords.  You guessed it – the good old US of A.  Early during his tenure as President, Donald Trump announced the United States’ intent to withdraw from the 2015 Accords.  Officially, we will not be able to do that until one day after the next Presidential Election.  So perhaps the 64% of Americans who don’t approve of Donald Trump’s Presidency won’t want to watch him be re-elected and then immediately tell the world “To Hell with talk about climate change!  Damn the torpedoes.  Full speed ahead.”

You can say many things about President Trump’s climate change denial.  But you can’t say he came to this perspective overnight.  Fully seven years ago, Donald Trump tweeted “It snowed over 4 inches this past weekend in New York City. It is still October. So much for Global Warming.”  A few months later, he tweeted that “Global warming has been proven to be a canard repeatedly over and over again.... The left needs a dose of reality.”  Then he added, “Reckless! Why is @BarackObama wasting over $70 Billion on 'climate change activities?' Will he ever learn?” In fact, one commentator put together an article a year ago chronicling 115 different instances in whichTrump has questioned climate change. 

President Trump didn’t come to his climate change denial alone.  He has been led by the wizards of the Republican Party and by a few Democrats from coal country.  The current leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, when asked about the issue in 2014 responded, “I'm not a scientist, I am interested in protecting Kentucky's economy, I'm interested in having low cost electricity."  That attitude was common enough that early in the Obama presidency, the Senate handed the President his very first major legislative defeat by refusing to pass cap-and-trade legislation. 

Sadly, for many Trump supporters, the mere mention of “climate change” has become a bogeyman, portending an effort on the part of the liberals to use the environment as an excuse to increase the size and scope of government.  It’s one thing for politicians to justify their apparent apathy on this issue by claiming to be agnostic as to the science.  But now, in our combative, polarized political climate, we have right-wing organizations talking about the global warning “hoax” as if it were a sinister plot by sneaky liberals to take over the economy with more bureaucracy and more regulation.  Donald Trump has used that term several times himself.  My guess is that it didn’t endear him to the majority of Americans.

You see, the majority of Americans have come to realize that talk about climate change or global warming is no hoax.  It’s no sinister liberal plot.  And you don’t even have to be a scientist to understand that we’re talking about a serious threat to our way of life.  You merely have to walk outside on a daily basis.  No, that won’t reveal the deterioration of the Great Barrier Coral Reef near Australia, the melting of the ice caps near the poles, or the exacerbation of droughts in East Africa.  To learn about those phenomena, you may actually have to read a newspaper, something that more and more Americans are loathe to do.  But simply walking outside your mountain home in California could tell you about the spike in deadly fires.  And simply walking outside your house in Minnesota could tell you about how winters aren’t nearly as cold as they used to be.  And attempting a simple stroll down the street in Wilmington, North Carolina, or New Orleans, Louisiana, or Houston, Texas may be deadly, because the “storms of the century” we used to endure have now become the new normal, and the only question is whether this year’s “storm of the century” is going to hit your hamlet or someone else’s. 

This is no hoax.  The consequences are only getting worse and more common.  And the more our politicians boast about “the economy,” the more that the sanest among us are worried that our economic accomplishments are the fruits, in part, of a reckless attitude toward Mother Nature.

I want to leave you today with a few simple points.  We used to think that living near water and trees was a blessing.  Now, they are becoming the agents of our destruction – respectively flooding our streets and falling on our houses.  We used to think that deadly hurricanes were “acts of God.”  Now, they are becoming acts of industry.   We used to think that politicians on both sides of the aisle could work together to tackle scourges that threaten the nation or the world.  Now, we watch as our leaders can’t even agree to save the environment.

And people wonder why Donald Trump’s approval rating is so low.  And why his political party is in such trouble in the Midterms.