By Michael Bastasch
The New York Times editorial board says that President Donald Trump is literally endangering the entire planet with his rolling back of the Obama administration’s climate agenda.
The NYTimes’ editorial, titled “Trump Imperils the Planet,” comes as the print edition published a 12-page special section on the “far-reaching and potentially devastating” consequences of Trump’s environmental policies.
The NYTimes’ editorial board members wrote the United Nations agreeing to rules to implement the Paris Agreement “was a hugely dispiriting event and a fitting coda to one of the most discouraging years in recent memory for anyone who cares about the health of the planet.”
To the NYTimes, it was “a year marked by President Trump’s destructive, retrograde policies, by backsliding among big nations, by fresh data showing that carbon dioxide emissions are still going up, by ever more ominous signs … of what a future of unchecked greenhouse gas emissions is likely to bring.”
Global greenhouse gas emissions are expected to hit record-highs in 2018, rising nearly 3 percent largely because of an uptick of coal-fired power generation. U.S. emissions are also projected to increase slightly this year, despite a decline in coal use.
“The peak in global emissions is not yet in sight,” reads a recent report released by the Global Carbon Project, which tracks emissions.
Virtually no major countries are on track to meet their emissions goals, and even countries, like China, who are ostensibly on-track aren’t actually reducing their emissions. China’s Paris accord pledge involves increasing emissions through at least 2030.
However, the NYTimes claimed that “[no] country’s backsliding, of course, compares with Mr. Trump’s” because of his rolling back three major Obama-era regulations aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
The Trump administration took steps to roll back Obama-era policies mandating cars get better gas mileage, forcing states to cut power plant emissions and effectively banning the building of new coal plants.
“These three programs formed the basis of Mr. Obama’s pledge at the 2015 Paris meeting to reduce America’s greenhouse gas emissions by 26 percent to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025,” the NYTimes claimed.
What the editorial board didn’t mention, though, is that taken together, the Obama administration’s Paris climate accord pledge would result in roughly 0.03 degrees Celsius of avoided warming by 2100, according to climate model projections.
If the atmosphere is less sensitive to carbon dioxide than most models estimate, which could very well be the case, then Obama’s climate agenda would have even less of an impact on projected warming.
“They will deserve, along with Mr. Trump, history’s censure for doing virtually nothing to move to a more responsible energy future — and for not doing so at just the moment when the world needed the kind of leadership that Mr. Obama and his secretary of state, John Kerry (and Bill Clinton and Al Gore before them), tried to provide,” the editorial board wrote.
That statement also referred to former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt and outgoing Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, both of whom aggressively pursued Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda before resigning.
Read more at Daily Caller
Meanwhile, US. emissions are down, while the rest of the world is going up. Seems like the NYT has a case of selective myopia.
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“barreling”? Really? — a degree or two is … “barreling”?
Should be “virtue-signalling cycle”.
What about the fresh data showing that US CO2 emissions are still going down? What about the fresh data showing wildfires and floods are no more extreme than usual, and that those … “frightening scientific reports” are still misrepresenting this fact to scare people irresponsibly?
That’s as far as I’ve made it through that scamatorial.
There is no data to support the claim of a “point of no return”, in the last 100K years, the world’s temperature has been as much as 5C warmer than it is today (with CO2 levels pretty much the same as pre-industrial levels) without hitting this mythical tippling point that they always worry about.
7,000 ppm CO2 could’t cause a “runaway greenhouse effect,” but now we’re supposed to believe that 400 ppm CO2 is a “tipping point” to a runaway greenhouse effect. Need I say more about how imbecilic their arguments are?!
He certainly endangers their world, that is why they keep squealing like stuck pigs!
Getting the world up to the temperature enjoyed during the Medieval Warm Period, but still cooler than the Roman and Minoan Warm Periods and way cooler than the Holocene Optimum is going to threaten life on this planet.
Really?
And we’re not even anywhere close to the MWP level anyway. When they’re farming in Greenland again where there is permafrost today, growing grapes in Scotland where they did back then but can’t now, and when the tree lines advance up the mountain slopes to where they were then, THEN we’ll have reached MWP warmth. Until then, it’s nothing but garbage “data” measuring UHI effects rather than actual changes to the temperatures.
“If the atmosphere is less sensitive to carbon dioxide than most models estimate, which could very well be the case,”
All of the actual, real world, science indicates that sensitivity is well less than that “estimated” by the models.
“If the atmosphere is less sensitive to carbon dioxide than most models estimate, which could very well be the case”
All of the science, using real world data, have found that the climate sensitivity is way below that estimated by the models.
What actually imperils the planet are the efforts of the Leftist politicians, the UN and EU and others to use the
co2-global warming meme to terrorize us into accepting a world socialist government, i.e., something truly frightening, a world wide Venezuela.
Also unmentioned by the TDS NYT board of fakers; is that America is only responsible for 1/6th of emissions by countries.
And that the USA is very successful at reducing CO₂ emissions solely through cleaner more efficient fuels and efficient conversion of those fuels to energy. Something that wind and solar are not!
Logic, NY Times style- while arguing that electric cars are the future, the Times argues for not rescinding the vehicle emission standards due out well into the future.
This is the same paper that calls TRUMP a demagogue.
And a fear-monger.
Textbook psychological projection.
yes NPC editorial board we get it: Orange man bad.
Here is the headline “Is there any Logic Left in the Left???”
And the answer is “none to be found”. Just make hysterical illogical accusations, about future results of current policy. Then expect the public to be dumb enough to believe what you say, without any evidence to support your position.
I openly question the IQ of anyone that pays for this, and thinks they are getting an informed “editorial opinion”. The evidence refutes their position, and it does not bother them one bit.
They are acting like they have transitioned to “Kamikazi mode”. They know they are going down, and they want to take out those that ridiculed their shoddy methods, and biased coverage.