If #NeverTrump, and, of course, I’m refering to those who consider themselves conservatives/libertarians/Republicans, would sit back and look at the record rather than the personality, they’d be cheering
Editorial: President Trump’s very bad year on climate change hurts us all
A few weeks ago the world received the United Nations’ Emissions Gap Report 2019, which again laid out in jarring detail how much humans have heated up the atmosphere through carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels. Not only is the science incontrovertible, but the impacts already are playing out before our eyes, and it’s probably too late, given the fast-rising temperature and political realities, to fully corral the problem. But it’s also inarguable that the world must act anyway — quickly — if it is to avert climate change’s most damaging effects, and that we desperately need innovative, persuasive and courageous political leaders to show the way.
This is all interesting, since Los Angeles would collapse without fossil fuels. Anyhow
Yet over the past year, and in the face of these ever more dire reports and warnings about the crisis that confronts us, President Trump has blithely continued to push policies and regulatory rollbacks that will increase carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions. Another study released in November warned that despite the overwhelming evidence that the world needs to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels, humankind will in 10 years be producing twice as much coal, oil and natural gas as it can safely consume and still limit the most severe impacts from human-caused global warming. That is disastrously wrong-headed. Governments around the world should be pursuing policies that will significantly reduce production and consumption while investing to support faster innovations in creating, distributing and storing renewable energy. Instead, Trump’s policies are designed to further increase U.S. production of oil and natural gas as part of his effort to make the U.S. the dominant producer of energy in the world.
So what did the Trump administration do this year to exacerbate the situation? It eased restrictions on the drilling of oil and gas wells in some sensitive habitats and drastically expanded the amount of federal lands available for leases by the oil, gas and coal industries (as well as mineral mining, which creates a different set of problems by exposing sensitive land to degradation). As part of that expansion, it shrank the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah and issued an executive order opening nearly all federal waters to offshore drilling (which the administration put on hold after legal setbacks). Trump loosened regulations limiting methane emissions at drilling sites. And after a Republican-led Congress in 2017 lifted the 35-year-old ban on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the administration moved this year to fast-track leases even as legal challenges work their way through the courts.
The Trump administration also this year finalized its rollback of the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which would have further restricted greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants, and replaced it instead with the Affordable Clean Energy Rule, a dubiously named policy that would do the opposite of what it seems to promise. The new rule not only contributes to global warming but seeks to shore up a domestic coal industry already dying because of market forces. (Other forms of energy production are cheaper.) The administration also reversed the Obama administration’s rejection of permits for the controversial Keystone XL Pipeline that will increase the flow of tar sands oil from Alberta to U.S. refineries.
Looks like some excellent reasons to support Trump, eh?
I just drove through the panhandle of Texas all the way to south texas for xmas vacation and I can tell you one thing. I saw 10000 windmills turning and that is not an exxageration. They were everywhere in Texas.
I can tell yas that in Nebraska and Kansas and Iowa there are huge farms of windmills everywhere and that is no exxageration. To suggest flyover country is the culprit in global warming with ambivalent attitutes is wrong headded. The real culprits are those snow flakes moaning about it living in huge cities and crying like baby goats looking for mama’s milk while they do nothing about it except consume.
We out chere in the midwest take this stuff seriously. Solar panels everywhere. Windmills on peoples lands. Well managed and well taken care of land. Trees planted and growing everywhere to removed c02.
These people need to take a road trip and they wont be so bent outta shape over flyover country being like this outrageous bunch of hillbillies raping the planet. They need to look at their own huge cities run by democrats if they want to find out who the real evil monsters are in this AGW scam.