In early July, six Republican House members sent a letter to Canadian Ambassador Kirsten Hillman asking her government to do something about smoke from Canadian wildfires drifting into the U.S.
According to The Canadian Press, “The lawmakers said successive years of wildfires in Canada have undermined air quality in their states and robbed Americans of their ability to enjoy the summer.”
Maybe Homeland Security Secretary and perpetual publicity blowhard Kristi Noem could find herself a costume and stand at the border and blow that offending smoke back north.
Still, Canadian wildfires – and those across the western United States – pose real dangers to those downwind. And those fires have grown increasingly virulent as the warming planet creates drier, more volatile tinder and fuel.
In a mid-September study published in Nature, “Stanford University researchers estimate that continued global warming could lead to about 30,000 additional deaths each year nationwide by 2050, as climate-driven increases in fire activity generate more smoke pollution across North America,” according to Science Daily.
The very science Republicans gleefully deny and disregard – and refuse to take action on – fuels the fires that adversely affect their constituents.
With variable weather/wind conditions, we are all downwind of each other at times. That is why global warming – verified on a daily basis – is a global problem. By promoting polluters, the U.S. helps create dangerous fire situations in Canada – and Washington and Idaho, etc.
So, in early September, our Environmental Pollution Agency proposed that more than 8,000 facilities be relieved of their responsibility to report greenhouse gas emissions. Such ignorance lets polluters pump out their poisons with impunity – as if a Trump administration would ever prosecute them.
In lockstep with denial, we find outright lying.
On NPR’s All Things Considered Sept. 2, Julia Simon reported, “A group of more than 85 scientists have issued a joint rebuttal to a recent U.S. Department of Energy report about climate change, finding it full of errors and misrepresenting climate science.”
Just as with Supreme Court judges and Congresspersons, there are scientists who will do the bidding of their paymasters.
The honest examiners of the Trumpian justification for more polluted poisoning profits found “several examples where the DOE authors cherry-picked or misrepresented climate science in the agency’s report,” Simon said. “For instance, in the DOE report the authors claim that rising carbon dioxide can be a ‘net benefit’ to U.S. agriculture, neglecting to mention the negative impacts of more heat and climate-change fueled extreme weather events on crops.”
After Trump’s [“DERANGED”] ramblings at the United Nations last month, which included calling global warming a “con job,” Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva answered Trump’s lies and vitriol by saying, “The denialism we face is not only related to climate; it is multilateral. No one is safe from the effects of climate change. Walls at borders will not stop droughts or storms. Nature does not bow down to bombs or warships. No country stands above another. The risk of unilateralism is the chain reaction it provokes.”
He added, “Because if we do not make a decision, society is going to stop believing its leaders. And instead of strengthening the struggle against global warming, we are going to help discredit multilateralism policies and democracy, and all of us will lose because denialism may actually win.”
Denialism is a core Trump policy. “The carbon footprint is a hoax made up by people with evil intentions,” he told the UN General Assembly.
In the eyes of Trump, Big Oil and fellow oligarchs, anything that costs them a penny is evil. But remember, many oil companies predicted more than 50 years ago [in-house, of course while lyingly denying it publicly] that their profit-driven pollution would warm our planet.
