{"id":38632,"date":"2018-10-03T08:59:58","date_gmt":"2018-10-03T13:59:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=38632"},"modified":"2018-10-03T08:59:58","modified_gmt":"2018-10-03T13:59:58","slug":"the-trump-administration-knows-the-planet-is-going-to-boil-it-doesnt-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=38632","title":{"rendered":"The Trump administration knows the planet is going to boil. It doesn’t care"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Trump administration knows the planet is going to boil. It doesn’t care<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Trump\u2019s team used last week to sneak in disastrous, linked policies on climate change and child refugee camps<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The Trump years are a fantasy land where we pretend we can go on living precisely as in the past, unwilling even to substitute electric SUVs for our gas guzzlers. Photograph: Mandel Ngan\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/header>\n
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I<\/span><\/span>n the cloud of toxic dust thrown up by the Kavanaugh hearings<\/a> last week, two new Trump initiatives slipped by with less notice than they deserve. Both are ugly, stupid \u2013 and they are linked, though in ways not immediately apparent.<\/p>\n

In the first, the administration provided the rationale for scrapping President Obama\u2019s automobile mileage standards: because Trump\u2019s crew now officially expects the planet to warm by 4C <\/a>. In the environmental impact statement <\/a>they say it wouldn\u2019t make much difference to the destruction of the planet if we all keep driving SUVs.<\/p>\n

The news in that statement is that administration officials serenely contemplate that 4C rise (twice the last-ditch target set at the Paris climate talks). Were the world to actually warm that much, it would be a literal hell, unable to maintain civilizations as we have known them. But that\u2019s now our policy, and it apparently rules out any of the actions that might, in fact, limit that warming. You might as well argue that because you\u2019re going to die eventually, there\u2019s no reason not to smoke a carton of cigarettes a day.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, reporters also discovered that the administration has set up what can only be described as a concentration camp near the Mexican border for detained migrant children, spiriting them under cover of darkness from the foster homes and small shelters across the nation where they had been staying.<\/p>\n

Not an extermination camp \u2013 these aren\u2019t Nazis \u2013 but a camp that literally concentrates this \u201cproblem\u201d in one place: a tent city in the middle of the desert. Schooling is not available there, as it was in the shelters they came from; instead the kids are given \u201cworkbooks that they have no obligation to complete. Access to legal services is limited.\u201d<\/p>\n

That camp is linked to climate change because, first, it\u2019s in a desert. If you searched high and low across the North American continent, you could barely find a place hotter and drier than Tornillo, Texas, where in June the average high is 96F<\/a> and where, as one climate data source<\/a> succinctly puts it, \u201cthere is virtually no rainfall during the year\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Trump administration knows the planet is going to boil. It doesn’t care Trump\u2019s team used last week to sneak in disastrous, linked policies on climate change and child refugee camps The Trump years are a fantasy land where we pretend we can go on living precisely as in the past, unwilling even to substitute […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[7013,141,7844,6917,827],"class_list":["post-38632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-bill-mckibben","tag-climate-change","tag-donald-trump","tag-the-guardian","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38632"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38632\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38633,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38632\/revisions\/38633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}