Dahr Jamail: Trump's Climate Plan: Add Fuel to the Fire

Exhaust rises from a smokestack in Lakewood, Washington, on December 23, 2009. (Photo: OnceAndFutureLaura)

By Dahr Jamail, Truthout | Report

With 2016 now locked in to be the hottest year ever recorded, easily surpassing the previous hottest year on record, which was last year, the need for dramatic government intervention aimed at lessening impacts of anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD) is paramount.

Yet, President-elect Donald Trump couldn't be a worse person to lead the United States, given that he has called ACD "bullshit" and a "hoax" and is reportedly already working to remove the US from the Paris Agreement on climate change.

"We're going to cancel the Paris climate agreement and stop all payment of US tax dollars to UN global warming programs," Trump said in North Dakota earlier this year.

While we still don't know what other actions he plans to take regarding ACD, but one of his first alarming actions after winning the election was naming Myron Ebell, a man well-known for his coal industry-funded attacks on climate science, to lead his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) transition team -- and possibly head the EPA.

Ebell is also extremely well known for his ACD denial: He is the chairman of the Cooler Heads Coalition, a group of nonprofit organizations that "question global warming alarmism and oppose energy-rationing policies."

For more original Truthout election coverage, check out our election section, "Beyond the Sound Bites: Election 2016."

"There has been a little bit of warming," Ebell told Vanity Fair in 2007, "but it's been very modest and well within the range for natural variability, and whether it's caused by human beings or not, it's nothing to worry about."

However, ACD denial is just the beginning of Trump's threat to the planet.

"While Trump campaigned as a political outsider, his transition team is filled with corporate lobbyists," Wenonah Hauter, the executive director of Food and Water Watch said in a recent press release. "His agriculture advisors are agribusiness insiders. He has called climate change a hoax, and his energy advisor is a lobbyist for the Koch Brothers. His reported top pick for energy secretary is Harold Hamm, a modern-day oil tycoon."

As recently as the end of October, during a campaign stop in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Trump laid out what his campaign deemed the "100-day plan to Make America Great Again," within which he promised during his "first day in office" to, among other things, allow the Keystone XL pipeline to move forward, lift restrictions on fossil fuel production and cancel "billions in payments to UN climate change programs."

His election has alarmed scientists around the globe.

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