The Breakage Machine Meets the Climate Crisis

One pities the historians who will have to look back on the Trump years. There’s simultaneously so much—an endless blizzard of words, a provocation or two or three in every news cycle, a string of insults, and small-time grifts—and so little.

Trump managed to repudiate both science and diplomacy, doing enormous damage to a pact negotiated over tortuous decades by leaders from every country on Earth.

Besides using a GOP majority to pass a massive tax cut for the rich, Trump’s tangible accomplishments are puny. Mostly he’s a master of making things worse, of destruction for its own sake. He’s a breakage machine.

And the timing of his quest to break things could not have been worse, because the Trump era came at the moment when the planet was already beginning to crack.

His tenure in office has coincided with the hottest temperature ever reliably recorded on planet Earth—130 degrees Fahrenheit (54.4 degrees Celsius), this summer, in Trump’s nation. It has coincided with the largest rainfall in U.S. history—Hurricane Harvey, which dropped more than five feet of rain on southeastern Texas in 2017. It’s seen massive Midwest floods, endless West Coast fires, and unprecedented storms like Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico in 2017.

And Trump’s response to all of that has been the equivalent of tossing a few rolls of paper towels. In fact, he’s done worse than that, suggesting that the incredible destruction of California’s Paradise fire was the fault of the locals for failing to carefully rake their forest floors.

Trump and his administration, which is packed with appointees with ties to the fossil-fuel industry, have also actively taken steps that seem designed to make the climate crisis worse: rolling back mileage standards for cars, thus undoing one of the few real climate gains of the Obama years; giving huge bailouts to oil and gas companies, even as the COVID-19 pandemic led to a decline in demand for their products; bending if not ending every possible environmental law to make it easier to build pipelines carrying yet more hydrocarbons; and opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—the largest wildlife refuge in the country—to more oil and gas drilling.

Making matters worse, Trump has blatantly ignored all of the possibilities for advancement. He arrived in office at the end of a ten-year period that had seen extraordinarily rapid falls in the price of solar and wind power, putting him in a prime place to massively expand renewable energy.

Instead, he declared that wind turbines cause cancer. He explained to the nation that windpower—which he seems to imagine is connected directly to our appliances à la The Flintstones—would subvert his favorite pastime.

“The woman, she wants to watch television and she says to her husband, ‘Is the wind blowing? I’d love to watch a show tonight, darling. The wind hasn’t blown for three days. I can’t watch television, darling. Darling, please, tell the wind to blow.’ ”

But that wasn’t all. Trump also put steep tariffs on solar panels coming into the country, blocking expansion of the industry to the tune of 1.8 million homes and killing 62,000 jobs in the process.

One date those future historians are likely to seize upon is June 1, 2017. That’s when the President—as the representative of the country that had put more carbon into the atmosphere than any other, and as the leader of the nation whose scientists had first nailed down the facts about climate change—went to the Rose Garden to announce his decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord.

In doing so, Trump managed to repudiate both science and diplomacy, doing enormous damage to a pact negotiated over tortuous decades by leaders from every country on Earth. With Trump’s withdrawal, we were literally the only nation on the planet not making at least token efforts to comply. South Sudan remains a party to the accord. Syria, too.

But there’s an interesting footnote to that story. Under the text of the agreement that President Obama signed in November 2016, the United States has to give notice before it leaves. That means the earliest that our country could officially exit the Paris Agreement is . . .  November 4, 2020—we’ll probably still be counting mail-in ballots by then.

This means, in essence, that the world will know, as it watches the election returns, whether America’s absence from last-ditch efforts to stave off climate change is temporary or—given the deadlines imposed by geophysics—effectively permanent.