03 August, 2018

The world is burning, and the Trump administration wants to make it worse

Look at the non-political news these days: Deadly wildfires burn out of control in parched California. Unusually heavy rains cause devastating floods in parts of Asia. A punishing heat wave kills scores in Japan, South Korea and normally temperate parts of Europe, pushing the mercury into the 90s in Scandinavia. Can anyone fail to see a pattern?
A man wipes his face with a towel during a hot
day in a residential district in Seoul on Thursday.
 
With increasing confidence — and growing alarm — some leading climate scientists attribute this summer’s bizarre weather to human-induced global warming. Meanwhile, the Trump administration wants to make it all worse.

This week we saw a juxtaposition of events that you couldn’t make up. On Wednesday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that 2017 was the second- or third-warmest year on record, depending on which data set is used, trailing only 2016 and perhaps 2015. The very next day, like some cat-stroking Bond villain, President Trump had his environmental vandals propose rolling back automotive fuel-efficiency standards, which would neuter one of the nation’s most effective means of mitigating climate change.


Read the opinion piece from The Washington Post by Eugene Robinson - “The world is burning, and the Trump administration wants to make it worse.”

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