The Corrupt Thought Within This Administration* Is Vast and Relentless
So, did everyone enjoy their holiday weekend? Was the weather lovely at the beach? I mention this only because, as we start this week, arrangements are being made deep in the heart of Camp Runamuck for everyone to have beachfront property someday in the future. From The New York Times:
Now, after two years spent unraveling the policies of his predecessors, Mr. Trump and his political appointees are launching a new assault. In the next few months, the White House will complete the rollback of the most significant federal effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, initiated during the Obama administration. It will expand its efforts to impose Mr. Trump’s hard-line views on other nations, building on his retreat from the Paris accord and his recent refusal to sign a communiqué to protect the rapidly melting Arctic region unless it was stripped of any references to climate change.
And, in what could be Mr. Trump’s most consequential action yet, his administration will seek to undermine the very science on which climate change policy rests.
Oh, hell, why not? Someday, when we're gone and highly evolved bees are running things, they're going to be amazed that those ambulatory meatbags who preceded them simply decided to stupid themselves into extinction.
Mr. Trump is less an ideologue than an armchair naysayer about climate change, according to people who know him. He came into office viewing agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency as bastions of what he calls the “deep state,” and his contempt for their past work on the issue is an animating factor in trying to force them to abandon key aspects of the methodology they use to try to understand the causes and consequences of a dangerously warming planet. As a result, parts of the federal government will no longer fulfill what scientists say is one of the most urgent jobs of climate science studies: reporting on the future effects of a rapidly warming planet and presenting a picture of what the earth could look like by the end of the century if the global economy continues to emit heat-trapping carbon dioxide pollution from burning fossil fuels.
This. Makes. No. Sense. This. Is. Freaking. Insane. Personal pique as national policy in the context of an existential threat to life on this planet. Jealousy and grudge-holding as a governing philosophy. There's also something of a problem with the people tasked with carrying out this boneheaded negligence.
However, the goal of political appointees in the Trump administration is not just to change the climate assessment’s methodology, which has broad scientific consensus, but also to question its conclusions by creating a new climate review panel. That effort is led by a 79-year-old physicist who had a respected career at Princeton but has become better known in recent years for attacking the science of man-made climate change and for defending the virtues of carbon dioxide - sometimes to an awkward degree.
Whatever does that mean?
“The demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler,” said the physicist, William Happer, who serves on the National Security Council as the president’s deputy assistant for emerging technologies.
It's as though the president* just wandered through the Fox News green rooms and hired everyone he passed in the hall. And this Happer gentleman, who once was a distinguished scientist before he departed from this plane of existence? He has been judged to be unacceptably eccentric even by members of the administration* who are unacceptably eccentric by any standard.
Mr. Happer’s proposed panel is backed by John R. Bolton, the president’s national security adviser, who brought Mr. Happer into the N.S.C. after an earlier effort to recruit him during the transition. Mr. Happer and Mr. Bolton are both beneficiaries of Robert and Rebekah Mercer, the far-right billionaire and his daughter who have funded efforts to debunk climate science. The Mercers gave money to a super PAC affiliated with Mr. Bolton before he entered government and to an advocacy group headed by Mr. Happer. Climate scientists are dismissive of Mr. Happer; his former colleagues at Princeton are chagrined. And several White House officials - including Larry Kudlow, the president’s chief economic adviser - have urged Mr. Trump not to adopt Mr. Happer’s proposal, on the grounds that it would be perceived as a White House attack on science.
That horse is out of the barn and running at a track in Mongolia.
Outside the United States, climate scientists had long given up on the White House being anything but on outlier in policy. But they worry about the loss of the government as a source for reliable climate research. “It is very unfortunate and potentially even quite damaging that the Trump administration behaves this way,” said Johan Rockstr?m, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “There is this arrogance and disrespect for scientific advancement - this very demoralizing lack of respect for your own experts and agencies.”
The amount of ineptitude and corrupt thinking that's going on at the lower levels of this administration* is vast and inexorable. Whoever comes in after this president* is going to be like the family who buys a lovely old mansion and after they live their for a year, the toddler stumbles onto the collection of human heads in the root cellar. The rot and corruption is deep here, and I'm not sure if anyone ever will get it all.
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