Climate Change and Trump’s America – by Gwynne Dyer (Gwynne Dyer.com – November 14, 2016)

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Even before Donald Trump hijacked the Republican Party, he was loudly declaring that the science of climate change, like Barack Obama, had not been born in the United States. It was, he insisted in 2012, a Chinese hoax “created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

The implication is clear. Back in the late 1980s, when climate change was first publicly identified as a threat, those sneaky Chinese must have bought or blackmailed prominent Western leaders and scientists to perpetrate this hoax. People like NASA scientist James Hanse, who made a landmark speech to Congress on global warming in 1988, and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who spoke at the United Nations about it in 1989.

Some other people, especially in the coal, oil and automobile industries, have been denying the reality of climate change for decades, but only The Donald realised it was a Chinese plot. (He does have a big brain, as he frequently points out.) At the time, most grown-ups wrote him off as a harmless crank – but they certainly have to take him seriously now.

Trump has promised that within 100 days of taking office he will “cancel” the Paris Climate agreement of last December and “stop all payments of US tax dollars to UN global warming programmes.” He will also rescind the executive actions that President Obama has taken to limit US emissions of carbon dioxide, especially in the field of electricity. (In effect, this would have closed down almost all coal-fired power stations in the United States.)

Now in practice, Trump can’t cancel the Paris Agreement, which has been signed by 195 countries. He can pull the US out of the treaty (as George W Bush, another climate change denier, pulled the US out of the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change in 2001), but he can’t stop other countries from carrying on with the agreed cuts in emissions – which they may well do, because they understand how dangerous the situation is.

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