Climate Scientists Analyze Trump’s Energy Plan and Call It What It Is, A Joke and Danger to the Planet

June 2, 2016 – When Trump announced his energy policy in Bismark, North Dakota, a little over a week ago, he stated he would cancel the Paris climate agreement. He also stated he would drill baby drill and revitalize the coal mining industry. In his remarks he made it quite clear that he would reverse all existing EPA initiatives. Exclaimed Trump, “Here is my 100-day action plan: Rescind all the job-destroying Obama executive actions, including the climate action plan.” So the only mention of the word “climate” was not accompanied by the word “change.”

Trump went on to blatantly lie about the climate change agreement signed in Paris in 2015. He stated that the treaty gave “foreign bureaucrats control over how much energy we reproduce, controlling what we are using and what we are doing on our own land and in our country.” That’s an amazing bit of fabrication considering the treaty is non-binding for all signatories and represents more a set of guidelines subject to future international meetings and review. No country has its “feet held to the fire” as Trump has proclaimed. For more fact checking of Trump’s speech I refer you to analysis that appears on Bill Moyers & Company website.

It didn’t take long for the world to react. Our Canadian government spokesperson stated “we wouldn’t comment on a hypothetical like that.” A German government official, however, was far more forthright describing it as “a disaster.” The Energy Secretary for the United States government called the policy foolish. MIT Technology Review published a piece written by Richard Martin entitled “Donald Trump’s ‘America-First Energy Plan’ Shows He Knows Virtually Nothing About the Issue.”

Trump’s call to “rescind all these job-destroying President Obama executive actions” in a belief that he will restore “millions of jobs and trillions of dollars” of wealth to the U.S. is described as not passing even cursory inspection.

Trump’s call to drill for more gas, and dig up more coal was accompanied by a pledge to deal with real environmental issues like clean water and clean air and noe of the phony stuff. He proclaimed the U.S. had 150% more oil and energy reserves than all OPEC countries combined (statistics drawn from thin air. A quick fact check shows Saudi Arabia alone has 6 times the oil reserves of the United States. And Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Qatar have 10 times the natural gas reserves of the United States. The only place where the United States can still outproduce these nations is in coal.) He proclaimed a mountain of wealth was tied up in American fossil fuel reserves worth $50 trillion. In his “America First” mantra he stated that the country would eliminate foreign imported oil (25% is imported today.) But in the same breath he proclaimed approval of KeystoneXL, the TransCanada pipeline to bring oil sands bitumen from Alberta to U.S. refiners. Obviously Alberta is an American state and Canada is not a foreign country.

Needless to say the scientific community expressed incredulity.

The Director of the American Meteorological Society Paul Higgins described Trump’s speech as yielding “larger changes in climate and faster rates of change,” posing a “greater risk to society.”

A senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Kevin Trenberth, described the remarks as showing “incredible ignorance with regard to the science and global affairs.” He pointed to Trump’s “pandering statements to the coal people” as a policy that would lead to disaster.

Rutgers University’s Jennifer Francis, Research Professor, Institute of Marine and Coastal Science, described the Republican presumptive nominee’s intentions as policy that “would not only diminish the quality of life for our children and their children, but…would…be a sorry message to the rest of the world that U.S. leadership does not base its decisions on facts or science but rather on greed and selfishness.”

Michael Mann, Director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University summed up the proposals as “an existential threat to this planet.”

And Katharine Hayhoe, Director, Climate Science Center, Texas Tech University, stated that Trump’s policy would mean the U.S. would add 0.66 Celsius (1.18 Fahrenheit) to mean global temperatures over and above the 2.0 Celsius target agreed to in Paris as a limit which the world cannot afford to exceed. She argues that “if the U.S. does nothing on climate, the chances of every other nation succeeding in its targets are small.”

The Trumpian declaration of war on “phony stuff” came out in the same week that a new study described what could happen if we continue to burn fossil fuels at present rates. Entitled “The climate response to five trillion tonnes of carbon,” is based on a scenario where all known fossil fuel reserves get burned between now and the year 2300. Using a series of complex climate models, researchers led by Katarzyna Tokarska, University of Victoria, British Columbia, predict a mean global temperature rise of 8 Celsius (14.4 Fahrenheit). Variability in temperature rise means increases in the Arctic as high as 17 Celsius (30.6 Fahrenheit). The models models also forecast enormous impacts on rainfall patterns with a significant decline in Central America, the Amazon Basin, North Africa and the Mediterranean Basin, Australia, and Southern Africa. The paper concludes, “the unregulated exploitation of fossil fuel resources could result in significant, more profound climate change,” than any policymakers could have predicted when convened in Paris last fall. But don’t tell that to Trump. It’s all “phony stuff” invented by the Chinese.