Donald J. Trump campaigned for the presidency on the heels of a series of outrageous assertions.
One of them involved climate change.
This individual would travel around the country and declare that climate change is a “hoax” — perpetrated by nations such as China. He would buck the consensus developed by the worldwide scientific community. Many scientists, including more than a few Nobel laureates, have concluded that Earth’s climate is changing, the temperature is warming — and that humankind is largely responsible for the change.
Polar ice caps are shrinking; animal habitats are being threatened; rampant development is ridding the world of millions of acres of forestland; yes, sea levels are rising and vast expanses of coastline around the world are being threatened.
A hoax? I don’t think so.
So the president pulls the United States out of the Paris Accord meant to unite the world’s nations in the fight against the changing climate. He wants to “make America great again.” How does this move accomplish that? By taking the world’s greatest nation out of the global discussion?
The president keeps harping on jobs, how regulations rob Americans of jobs. He never mentions all the jobs being created by the development of alternative energy sources, such as wind, solar and nuclear power.
Trump yaps about bringing back the coal industry, about boosting the production of petroleum. He rolls back environmental regulations with the blessing — and this is hard to stomach — of the Environmental Protection Agency administrator.
And yet, when the media keep asking the president’s representatives about whether he still believes climate change is a hoax, they won’t answer. They hem and haw, they bob and weave, they won’t provide a direct answer to a direct question.
I’ll ask again here: Does the president still insist that all the evidence we are witnessing in real time is a hoax, a figment of our imagination?
