The 360-Degree Assault on Climate Action Is Impossibly Grim

The plan, such as it is, appears to be to let it simply reenter the atmosphere and burn up. As of 2023 at least, according to NASA, the data are “of exceptionally high quality,” the instrument itself “is in excellent condition,” and there is enough propellant on board to last until 2040. They would just rather not hear about CO2 in the atmosphere; mix this in with the attempts to more or less destroy the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and to zero out NASA’s science budget, and you get a country placing its head firmly in the sand.

In a similar vein, reporting of climate science and action to the public: Energy Secretary Chris Wright recently answered questions about the National Climate Assessments that have been unceremoniously disappeared from government websites, saying that they had plans to “update” that existing science. It is hard to imagine a more ham-handedly authoritarian move (climate scientist Michael Mann, to The Guardian: “This is exactly what Joseph Stalin did”) than to literally go back and edit scientific output along ideological grounds, and yet here we are.

Last month Wright’s department got the project off the ground by dragging the same tired cadre of ghoulish deniers that have been foisted on the public for two decades to issue their own overview of climate change, with predictable results. Actual experts called it a “farce.” The Environmental Protection Agency’s proposal to undo the 2009 endangerment finding, which was based on decades of rock-solid science and which underpins essentially all attempts to reduce emissions in the US, only adds to the effect.

Keeping the public in the dark will be exacerbated by trying to wall off the US from the international nature of climate action. It’s not just the Paris Agreement, which of course the president promised to pull out of on day one, though that’s obviously a problem. Just this week it was reported that Trump and his cronies are pressuring the International Energy Agency to stop talking about a peak in oil and gas production, and in general to align itself more with the absurdist fossil fuel future the Oil Administration envisions. The pressure, apparently, extends to actually trying to replace high-ranking officials in a agency based in France with their own dirty lackeys.

Then there’s the full-bore attempt to make the root problem worse. In the name of an entirely fabricated “energy emergency,” they are trying to cut every bit of red tape that might slow down expanded oil and gas drilling, and even coal mining and use. While one hand does that, the other swings the sword at every wind turbine in sight, undercutting renewable energy even as the economics of the industry and recent legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act were initiating a true revolutionary boom. Trump’s legislative victory with the Big Dumb Bill is projected to jump emissions by 190 million metric tons in 2030, and by 470 million in 2035. From a climate perspective, they are a death cult.

Make it worse, stop monitoring it, stop communicating the risk — and make it harder to deal with the consequences. Those National Climate Assessments purged from government sites have huge chunks about adaptation, and how the country is and should be dealing with everything from sea level rise to drought. Per the most recent such report: “adaptation across the US has been incremental in nature, and given the expected future pace of climate change, more action is needed at greater rates and larger scales.” In April, Trump halted work on the next assessment; who needs help adapting to a problem we say doesn’t exist?