There are many things to be worried about with a Trump presidency but this is perhaps the most potentially damaging.
On the day of his inauguration, climate change ceased to exist.
All References to ‘Climate Change’ Deleted From White House Website at Noon Today
‘At 11:59 am eastern, the official White House website had a lengthy information page about the threat of climate change and the steps the federal government had taken to fight it. At noon, at the instant Donald Trump took office, the page was gone, as well as any mention of climate change or global warming.’
“President Trump is committed to eliminating harmful and unnecessary policies such as the Climate Action Plan and the Waters of the U.S. rule,” the site now says.
Climate Depot statement: “Climate skeptics are thrilled that one of the very first visible changes of the transition of power between President Obama and President Trump is the booting of “climate change” from the White House website. Trump is truly going to make science great again and reject the notion that humans are the control knob of the climate and UN treaties and EPA regulations can somehow regulate temperature and storminess. Welcome to the era of sound science!”
Update: With White House “climate change” page now removed, a pledge to increase drilling has been added as part of ‘An America First Energy Plan.’
Perhaps we need to invite Donald to come and experience an Australian summer.
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Hi Kaye,
Thank You for pointing this out. Seems you are always on the look. Love it. But you made some minor mistake.
“There are many things to be worried about with a Trump presidency but this is perhaps the most potentially damaging”
It is by far the most damaging policy step ever undertaken. The most dangerous for 3 reasons.
1) Wrong signal to imbeciles such as One Nation, LNP. They will use it to dismantle RET.
2) US is still the second biggest polluter on the planet.
3) The planet is running out of time fast!!
And still, being an optimist, the US population and the world, will not let him get away with this. Renewables are unstoppable.
It is time for the international community to start imposing sanctions on countries like the US and Australia who are failing to pull their weight.
We should cancel all military purchases from them starting with Tony’s flying lemons.
Thanks, Kaye. I wonder how Australians and Americans would like having sanctions imposed on them. Gosh. The mind boggles. Bring it on.
kate, Europe has history on this
May 14, 2011
QANTAS will be forced to lift international airfares to Europe from next January after being slapped with a penalty by the European Union because Australia does not have a price on greenhouse gas emissions.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/aviation/european-union-tax-on-carbon-to-push-up-airfares/news-story/e83787639f9fa08bb5c30d349d6d545f
And more recently…
The US should be hit with punitive sanctions if its new president orders its withdrawal from the Paris climate change treaty, says acclaimed Canadian activist and author Naomi Klein.
http://thenewdaily.com.au/news/world/2016/11/11/donald-trump-climate-change/
Copies of those deleted pages have been made and the climate data held by U.S. agencies is also being copied by scientist who are concerned that it too may disappear.
Search criteria: scientist backup climate data
Article 28 of the Paris Agreement says no ratifying country can withdraw for three years after which they must give 12 months’ notice of an intention to withdraw……there remains the prospect of a Trump administration deliberately breaching its obligations by unilaterally withdrawing.
“And I believe there has to be an international response that’s very, very swift,” Klein said.
“If you sign a trade agreement and you break the rules there are consequences and there have to be consequences. We’re hearing a little from Angela Merkel [Germany] that she’s putting Trump on notice about what they are not going to put up with.”
Thanks for the link, Kaye. Presumably the penalty was dropped when Julia Gillard’s government introduced the Carbon Tax. Do you know if the penalty was re-applied when Tony Abbott got rid of the Carbon Tax?
Kaye Lee wrote: “Perhaps we need to invite Donald to come and experience an Australian summer.”
A summer in Washington DC is a sweltering greenhouse. Night time temperatures routinely into the 30’s due to the appalling humidity. On top of that, there are bugs… lots of them, day and night versions.
Pity they can’t go back and change some of the taxation laws that enables repeat “on paper” bankrupts to not ever really pay tax. 6 Trump property companies went broke due to reckless borrowing. Across the many Trump types that exist in the US that would save many billions. It is completely unfair that taxpayers should pay for the egotism and stupidity of people such as Trump in such a massive loss of tax that would otherwise have been paid on future earnings. It makes risk, into non-risk.
To be honest, I do not even believe interest on business loans should be deductible – above a certain point that is. OK for a new company – but not for established companies earning incomes, who use it to purchase other companies. It is a big part of the rise in wealth of the 1%.
Nah, yer all rong! Abbott was rite all alongg! And the drongos up in Morreee can’t even read the bloody thermometre.
Just BS, 27 days above 35c. Never appen!
Nah, I support Tones and Drumps! (And our Paulennee from the Takeaway……..)
[Night time temperatures routinely into the 30’s due to the appalling humidity]
Yuk. Average summer temps are hotter across more US states than I expected. It would not surprise me if this heat drives some of the stupidity of the South.
Last night I was looking at a spreadsheet I keep of Sydney (Observatory Hill) weather that I started in 2004. I was trying to work out how much above the long term average this Jan will be – it looks like being around 3.5% degrees based on max temp forecasts.
What I noticed was that of the 154 months in the spreadsheet
• 5 months are below average
• 4 months are at average
• 145 months are above average.
“Heat Stress is Australia’s number one natural killer, accounting for the deaths of more people than floods, cyclones, bushfires and storms combined”
If we have common blackouts as we might in the future* – we are going to need to be a lot slimmer and fitter….or a lot more people will be dying. Myself included, even though Sydney is quite temperate relative to other areas.
*Not just due to GW longer term – but also due to plutocracy in the short term, where rights to the countries gas have been signed away by unregulated business.
The thing that baffles me with Trunp’s claim that the Chinese are destroying US manufacturing, is that it’s not the chinese it’s his greedy mates like the Walton’s who use China because they don’t want to pay US wages!
I have read several climate related articles so far today and have several more to go.
Here are a few:
“No mainstream media organisation covered the report.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change-risk-assessment-global-warming-government-accused-burying-report-a7540726.html
“If the underside of the ice shelf melts a bit, this fresher water will travel along the bottom of the shelf up to the surface. As the pressure diminishes on its way up, the water crosses its freezing point and snaps into ice crystals, known as platelet ice. The more of the ice shelf melts from below, the more sea ice forms on the surface – so the theory goes.”
http://thespinoff.co.nz/science/20-01-2017/antarcticas-great-apron-of-sea-ice-just-issued-the-world-with-a-bold-message-now-to-work-out-what-that-message-is/
“All of Trump’s nominees rejected his claims that climate change is a hoax, but all cast doubt on the degree to which humans are contributing, and to the threats it poses. It’s a softer, cuddlier form of climate denial that doesn’t reject all scientific research – just the vast majority – and yields the same end result of obstructing climate solutions.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2017/jan/23/were-now-breaking-global-temperature-records-once-every-three-years
Cheers.
They hoped we wouldn’t notice the latest emissions report here too H.
“one of the last acts of the government in 2016 was to release the March and June quarterly greenhouse gas emissions reports on the Thursday before Christmas.
The transparent desire to release the report at a time when most of the public were in holiday mode is all you need to know to realise how bad it is for the government.
The report showed that greenhouse gas emissions from electricity have continued to rise since the repeal of the carbon price. Emissions from electricity generation in the June quarter last year were 4.4% higher than in the June 2014 quarter – the last quarter under the carbon price.
It demonstrated that while the government’s Direct Action policy might be good at providing money to companies to do what they were already planning to do – or even not do what they were already planning not to do – it utterly fails at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Now that wouldn’t matter much, except of course 2016 was the hottest year on record and policy sops to climate change deniers such as is Direct Action are one of the main reasons why preventing temperatures rising by 2C above pre-industrial levels is now almost beyond our ability.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/22/not-even-the-tennis-can-distract-us-from-how-badly-this-government-is-doing
Kaye Lee
Thanks for that link.
Appreciated.
Cheers.
The US Government climate change pages are still available on archive.org (who incidentally are frantically trying to raise money to copy the entire Internet Archive to a mirror in Canada to keep it safe from Trump).
Trump also deleted pages on LGBT people as well. He really is doing the 1984 trick of trying to change reality. Not really surprising for a chronic and compulsive liar, I suppose.
My website is hosted in USA at a company who gets all their energy from wind power. That might not have been such a great idea. Trump is appointing a telecommunications company lobbyist as head of the FCC (Federal Communications Commission). This idiot (I’ve forgotten his name) is very much against net neutrality. So in the future I, and many other people, may find our websites are much slower and less reliable compared to those run by corporations who can afford to pay what amounts to “protection money”. I might start looking into getting hosting at one of the small pacific nations who earn much of their national income now from webhosting. They’re beyond the reach of the USA and Australian governments.
Compare Trump’s delusional stand on energy with Obama’s. Here is an article Barack Obama wrote recently.
The irreversible momentum of clean energy
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2017/01/06/science.aam6284.full
Trump is so stupid he had to get other people to ghost write his books and others have to write his speeches for him. Barack Obama has written 3 books that I know of, and I think he writes all his own speeches, some of which have since become famous for their inspirational content.
trump can make some of the climate data go away; he can shut down US climate science; he can make the deniers happy, at least for a short while; in fact he can do pretty well whatever he wants, BUT he cannot change the facts – and that means inevitable failure of his presidency – that will be his legacy for all time.
I’m boycotting all things identifiably made in America from this point on. A simple symbolic political action on my part that trump can do nothing whatsoever about.
Phil given that a tipping point has been reached in the Antarctic which will potentially raise the level of the oceans up 16 metres above present levels, trump’s legacy will be a short one!
Phil, they will try… with alternative facts. It’s been going on for a while, encouraged by the likes of Abbottclimatechangeiscrap and the even more unhinged Roberts’ reinterpretations of science. Let’s hope the principles behind democracy have not been irreparably damaged by the time Trump is booted oot
It is expected that 2017 will set new records in global warming… again. When 2018 does the same it will be glaringly obvious to the most blinkered climate denialist that it is a genuine problem. The backlash against the Republicans will be strong. Apart from the effects of climate change, they will have made enemies of the poor, the sick, the elderly, the young, the women, people of color, LGBT people, and friends and family of all those people… in short, everybody except the minority of angry white-supremacist men.
Already the Republicans are only able to have any power by fiddling the vote using every dirty trick in the book — gerrymandering districts, preventing black and poor and young people from voting, intensive lobbying and bribing of corrupt politicians by wealthy corporations, and using the mass media for propaganda. They haven’t had a genuine majority for a long time. I’m betting Trump will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Yes, Trump can do a lot of damage while in power, but in reality the USA government was never doing a lot to help anyway. It has always been up to the ordinary people to fix the problem, and that has been gathering pace brilliantly. Solar panel adoption has continued to grow at an accelerating pace. Business has seen that the cheapest power source is wind power and has been investing in it far more than fossil fuels.
In Australia, even with a denialist government we have still become one of the world leaders in solar installations. In spite of getting rid of financial incentives people are still buying solar systems. Electricity companies are trying to fight against solar homes, but they’re just causing people to disconnect from the grid. This means the idiotic electricity companies lose the benefit of distributed power generation, further worsening their own viability. Politicians try to retard wind power, but businesses know an opportunity when they see one and are still investing in it.
Fossil fuels are increasingly seen as risky investments and people and businesses are pulling their money out. They understandably don’t want to lose their money when the fossil fuel companies come crashing down, as they have already begun doing, beginning with coal companies. Oil companies will follow soon, and then gas companies.
Sorry Trump and denier mates, the facts re cc are become clearer and clearer.
How much can a single person affect Earth’s changing climate? According to researchers in the United States and Germany, 3 square meters of summer sea ice disappear in the Arctic for every metric ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) that a person directly or indirectly produces.
How can one person produce 1 metric ton of CO2? That’s about a roundtrip flight from New York to Europe per passenger. Or, a 4,000-kilometer car ride.
My hilux now has 560,000 km on the clock (done over 24 years).
Trump insists that the number of people at his inauguration exceeded those at Obama’s. Photos make that look like a lie, but he has perplexed people by claiming they were camouflaged. Well, that might be so… heheheh 😀 I love this picture:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C2yTYfRVIAERTYa.jpg
Who would’ve thought there would be that many KKK members? 😀
President Donald Trump signed executive orders on Tuesday clearing the way for the controversial Dakota Access and Keystone XL oil pipelines to move forward. He also signed an executive order to expedite environmental reviews of other infrastructure projects, lamenting the existing “incredibly cumbersome, long, horrible permitting process.”
It remained unclear how President Trump’s order would restart the pipeline projects or expedite environmental reviews. Many of those reviews are statutory and the legislation that created them cannot be swept aside by an executive order. The White House did not immediately release texts of the orders.
http://www.smh.com.au/world/donald-trump-to-give-green-light-to-dakota-access-keystone-xl-oil-pipelines-20170124-gty25x.html
He really doesn’t have a clue. He seems to think he has been made dictator.
Yes, he thinks it was a coronation, not an inauguration.
Miriam English
Trade depends on transport depends on oil.
Your renewable utopia ain’t gonna happen. Sorry.
Also, I have not seen any time stamp on that photo.
I have posted this link before. It is a site that I visit almost every day because, I am very concerned about both polar regions. I shows a daily map of sea ice extend for both poles.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
Cheers.
Harquebus, you’re wrong. The renewable change is already happening, sorry.
What photo?
H, it occurs to me you might be referring to the inauguration day photo. It was a joke image, but nevertheless representative of the historically low turnout for Trump’s big day. If you have any lingering doubts that a piddling number of people showed up to tragic Trump’s coronation then this might put your mind at ease:
timelapse of the National Mall on Inauguration Day
I don’t normally promote Robert Scribbler because, he has banned me due to my anti renewable stance but, this is too important so, I have made an exception.
“So much widespread melt and rifting of Antarctica’s ice shelves is a clear warning sign.”
https://robertscribbler.com/2017/01/23/abnormal-antarctic-heat-surface-melt-giant-cracks-in-ice-shelves-more-troubling-signs-of-a-world-tipping-toward-climate-chaos/
Miriam English
Thank you for posting that link.
Cheers.