Climate deniers

[stpioc]

The five stages of climate denial..

Stage 1: Deny the Problem Exists
Stage 2: Deny We're the Cause
Stage 3: Deny It's a Problem
Stage 4: Deny We can Solve It
Stage 5: It's too Late

To date, the Trump administration has pinballed between Stages 1, 2, and 3, calling climate change a Chinese hoax, disputing the degree of human causation (100% since 1950), and claiming it’s not a threat.  But the purpose of climate science denial is to obstruct climate policies, and science denial doesn’t hold up in court.  Unlike in the political realm, judicial decisions are generally based on evidence. 

The Trump administration wants to roll back the Obama administration’s increased vehicle fuel efficiency standards. But under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), “if a proposed major federal action is determined to significantly affect the quality of the human environment,” the agency has to publish an environmental impact statement (EIS).  And so, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) was required to publish an EIS detailing how the proposed fuel efficiency rollbacks would impact the environment, including via climate change.  Here, the Trump administration shifted to Stage 4 and 5 climate denial.

The tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individual actors using a shared-resource system act in their own seeming self-interest and deplete the resource as a result.  For example, consider a small fishery with a dozen fisherman each catching as many fish as he can.  Soon the resource becomes overfished and every fisherman suffers the consequences.  Only if they all agree to limit their catches to sustainable levels can the fishery remain a long-term stable resource for all of the fishermen.


We’re in the same situation with climate change. Every country can act in its own short-term self-interest and continue burning lots of seemingly cheap fossil fuels; the long-term result in that scenario would be a catastrophic destabilization of the global climate on which we all rely. Or every country can agree to take steps like increasing vehicle fuel efficiency standards that cumulatively will slow global warming and avoid the worst climate change impacts.

Of course, being a short-sighted nationalist, Donald Trump is the only world leader to reject the Paris climate agreement. His administration is similarly making short-sighted arguments that coincidentally serve the best interests of the fossil fuel industry, while in this case producing the equivalent carbon emissions of adding 9 million more cars on the road.

The Trump administration has entered Stage 5 climate denial | Dana Nuccitelli | Environment | The Guardian