It is said that as Rome burned to the ground the Emperor Nero was so unconcerned about the impact of the disaster on ordinary citizens that he played the fiddle. It is a piece of selfish folly that has become a stark warning of the consequences of being an out-of-touch leader.
It is also said that history repeats itself the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. Whilst Los Angeles was burning down, president-elect Trump fiddled with the facts and the idea of invading Greenland. Could anything be more bitterly farcical?
Forget buying Greenland – it’s the climate that needs action, now … or never
The evidence that there is an urgent climate calamity starting to engulf human society is in plain sight for anyone who cares to look. The data clearly shows that since the start of the industrial revolution, humanity has pumped so much carbon dioxide into the air that we have increased it from around 280 parts per million to over 420.
It is a scientific fact that air containing more carbon dioxide traps more heat. More heat generates higher winds and more water in the atmosphere. That is why no scientific expert with any remote credibility doubts that burning fossil fuels has begun to make the climate more extreme.
If you wish to visualise what this change means in practice, then it is only necessary to look at the images taken recently in Valencia or footage from Los Angeles in the last few days. No one can say for certain that any particular event is the direct result of climate change, but any scientist worth their salt will tell you that extreme weather happens more often when the atmosphere warms.
The horrible truth is that events like those in Los Angeles are going to carry on happening more frequently and getting more extreme for at least another 30 years, as this is how long it is expected to take to stop the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increasing. And that is if all goes according to the plans made at non-binding COP conferences.
Even then things don’t return to normal. Once we stop pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere, then perhaps the problem might stop getting worse, if we haven’t triggered uncontrollable feedback mechanisms. But this won’t actually improve the climate. It takes actual reductions in CO2 to do that, which means that we are already locked in to another half-century or more of increasingly violent events like we’ve just witnessed. Only then might we be able to return the global climate to a period of natural, slow change.
The Trump plan – don’t just ignore the problem, make it worse!
Faced with all the evidence, president-elect Trump has a plan. He has decided to ignore the problem and go all out to “drill baby drill” every last bit of cheap power he can find in the US. Not satisfied with stripping resources out of the ground in places like the US national parks, he has also developed an obsession with doing so in Greenland and Canada.
Despite all the rhetoric I doubt very much whether Trump cares which nation has sovereignty over Greenland. He does care a lot about getting the rights to access their oil and gas reserves. If he succeeds, then those who are allocated those licences will make a great deal of money. The people who are unlucky enough to live in places where extreme weather events happen will lose everything they have built up during their lives.
Instead of facing up to the necessity to transform technology, Trump has chosen to try and transform reality and manipulate facts. Bluntly he has decided to lie and to blame everyone and everything other than his own policies on fossil fuels. He has done so by issuing a smokescreen of accusations, instead of offering the practical help a president-elect should.
Oh, and lie …
Top of the list of the lies is that the fires only got out of control because Los Angeles first responders didn’t have enough water to fight them.
The truth is that the LA reservoirs were virtually full and there is an excellent system of hydrants across the city. Unfortunately, the speed of the winds and the extraordinarily dry conditions were such that it simply wasn’t possible to pump enough water quickly enough to fight multiple fires that were breaking out behind firefighters. There also wasn’t enough water pressure to pump water uphill in sufficient volumes. That had nothing to do with arguments over the use of increasingly scarce water many miles to the north of the city.
The other smokescreen that has been thrown up by Trump supporters is that environmentalists refused to allow brushwood to be burned off and that meant there was a lot of tinder wood just waiting to go up. Those who have put forward this theory have not explained how it might have been possible to safely burn off brushwood in a densely packed urban area like Los Angeles. Droughts and high winds were the real causes of these fires, and they are precisely what climate change scientists have told us for years will become more extreme unless we take action.
The cost of inaction – or of acting too slowly
There are, of course, a lot of people who recognise that climate change is happening but think that we ought to act slowly and with caution in case we damage the economy. Those people might wish to look at the costs of what happened in Valencia and in Los Angeles and calculate the financial consequences.
Destruction of cars, homes and lives is very expensive. The insurance companies who have covered the risk of all those homes in Los Angeles simply don’t have enough money to pay out on the claims. Either they will go bankrupt or they will have to raise premiums to sky high rates. Both of those things will have a viciously negative impact on the economy. If you can’t insure a home, it becomes worth a pittance. If a large insurance company defaults, it tests the entire global economic system in a way that became all too evident during the 2007–28 crash.
It doesn’t seem to matter to MAGA conspiracy theorists how far their ideas diverge from reality or what damage they do to their own country. At the height of the recent hurricane season some of them argued that the hurricanes had been caused by the Democrats who wanted to undermine Trump’s bid for the presidency.
With such gaps between the real world and silly political theories it is unlikely that Trump and his supporters are going to have a change of mind until fires sweep up the fairways on his favourite Florida golf course. In such circumstances there is no point in pandering to the deluded fantasies of a multi-billionaire who prefers to believe his own propaganda over the evidence of the global disaster his support for fossil fuel extraction is causing.
Stand up to Trump
Britain no longer has an ally in the United States. It has a dangerous enemy in charge, following policies that will take us all beyond the brink of disaster. It is time for all people of good will to stop hoping he will moderate his stance, he will suddenly start engaging with reality and that he will not the things he has said he will do. The petulant manchild who has taken power in the States needs opposing every step of the way. A bully can’t be stopped by watching from safety as he steals your friend’s lunch money.
Perhaps the time has come for the good people of Canada to ride to our rescue and declare the United States to be a Province of Canada.
