It's the day after President Trump followed a jazz band into the White House Rose Garden to give a spectacular performance of his own, an alternately counterfactual and delusional speech announcing he was pulling the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement. As Steve Bannon tightened up the marionette strings above, Trump embarked on a fact-free dystopian diatribe that rivaled his bizarrely dismal inauguration speech. He cited a faulty study from the pro-industry U.S. Chamber of Commerce to claim the pact would kill 2.7 million jobs. He also misrepresented China's commitment to the pact, and generally sought to paint the accords as a devious plot by 194 nations to take America's money.
Trump even produced one of the more remarkably dim quotes in Rose Garden history to present his basic premise:
"The United States will cease all implementation of the nonbinding Paris accord and the draconian financial and economic burdens the agreement imposes on our country."
The nonbinding agreement is irredeemably draconian. Right. Later, he said the accords didn't go far enough in curbing carbon emissions—which is true, but isn't a proper argument for withdrawal. Without the agreement, the MIT study Trump cited found temperatures will rise an additional degree by the end of the century, and the accords were designed to be reassessed periodically so countries could ratchet up their commitments.
But it's silly to even pretend Trump made this decision based on a sober review of the economic and environmental impacts. According to The Washington Post, the fate of a groundbreaking international agreement to combat an existential threat to human civilization was determined, at least in part, by a personal beef:
Luckily, we won't be needing the agreement—or to take any action at all, ever. Just ask Republican Congressman Tim Walberg of Michigan. At a town hall this week, Walberg was pressed about his views on climate change—perhaps with the looming prospect of Trump's big Paris decision in mind. His answer?
If climate turns out to be a problem, God will take care of it.
This prompts the immediate question of why God is causing this in the first place if he'll just have to fix it later, but that's another issue. The idea that climate change isn't real, or it's overblown, or it's God's Plan, or whatever, there's nothing we can do about it, are among the most deeply held Republican dogma. Just ask the Vice President of the United States, Mike Pence, who joined the hallowed ground of political discourse known as Fox & Friends this morning to explain that climate change was just a liberal special interest issue:
No conservative political party in any other developed nation in the world disputes the scientific consensus that man-made climate change is real. The Republican Party in the United States of America is the only one. This is not a liberal issue, and only fools and shills for the fossil fuel industry have convinced themselves it is. Once again, you have to wonder if conservatives understand that the sea level rise will not just drown cities full of coastal liberal elitists. It will not discriminate—and neither will the harsher, more frequent droughts in Red America.
Meanwhile, the head of the EPA, Scott Pruitt—whose nominal job is to protect the environment—was so chuffed about the president's decision that he took himself out to a nice little dinner.
A French bistro! Maybe it came recommended by French President Emmanuel Macron:
Maybe not.
And maybe this is a good time to remember that Scott Pruitt was involved in 13 different lawsuits against the EPA when this kakistocratic administration tapped him to lead the agency, and that he once received a letter criticizing an EPA regulation from an energy company, pasted his letterhead on it, and sent it on to the EPA as official correspondence from the Attorney General of Oklahoma.
Don't worry, though. Pruitt is sure to oversee a great period in our environmental history. Just ask his boss. "We'll be the cleanest," Trump said yesterday. "We're going to have the cleanest air. We're going to have the cleanest water." A study from Yale cited by The New York Times found we're 43rd in air quality, 22nd in water, and 44th in climate and energy policy. Guess we've got some work to do—good thing the EPA is now offering buyouts to staff ahead of massive budget cuts. Our "carbon emissions per capita remain significantly higher than those of China or India," the Times also reminds us, "countries that Mr. Trump branded as the world's big polluters."
China is also ramping up its clean energy production, and soon will be shipping solar panels all around the world. They will seize the mantle, not just in renewable energy production, but in global leadership—all because we've elected a man who is consumed by nostalgia and a dreamlike past where men were men and they went down into the coal mines for an honest day's work. Or maybe that's a sell line. After all, to summarize it in New Yorkese, he used to say that coal miners were schmucks.
In the end, maybe we all are. It is truly spectacular to watch one of the two major political parties in the World's Greatest Democracy slowly doom the planet through a combination of proud ignorance and bottomless greed.
Jack Holmes is a senior staff writer at Esquire, where he covers politics and sports. He also hosts Unapocalypse, a show about solutions to the climate crisis.
