The United States of America was the laughingstock of the world Tuesday, and it had nothing to do with the president’s Oval Office Smackdown with Chuck and Nancy. Yes, while the World’s Most Powerful Man was ruining his made-for-TV special with repeated self-owns, there was actually another reason for countries still somewhat moored to reality to cackle in our national face. The Trump administration dispatched an adviser-the inevitably named Wells Griffith-to a United Nations conference in Poland focused on combatting the climate crisis, and he apparently had a mandate to use his appearance to extol the virtues of fossil fuels.
You know, the stuff that’s causing the crisis, because we keep burning it. This did not go over well.
Poor Wells Fargo-sorry, Griffith. He really drew the short straw here, having to go out in front of people who’ve devoted themselves to battling an existential threat to human civilization and proudly announce the United States’ intention to spit on their efforts. And make no mistake: the threat to civilization is real, as we detailed last week while tracing the background of Trump’s ambassador to Canada:
The fourth and latest National Climate Assessment put together by 300 scientists from 13 agencies of the U.S. government and released last month found that climate change is real, man-made, and will cost the U.S. 10 percent of its economy by 2100. Midwestern farmers will lose 75 percent of their crop yields, and trillions of dollars in coastal real estate will be at risk. The wildfires out west, already unprecedented in their destruction, will get worse. Hurricanes and typhoons will grow more ferocious. Epidemic diseases will flourish.
This mirrored October’s dire assessment from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change-compiled by 91 leading scientists from 40 different countries based on more than 6,000 scientific studies conducted by still more scientists-which found human civilization as we know it will be in severe peril by 2040, and that we have 12 years to dramatically change course to avoid that scenario.
Apparently, Griffith refused to answer at the conference whether he accepted that last conclusion. Funny how that works.
It turns out his straw was even shorter because the Trump folks largely telegraphed this plan in the lead-up, which gave activists ample notice to prepare a counter-protest. The Washington Post tracked the details:
“We strongly believe that no country should have to sacrifice economic prosperity or energy security in pursuit of environmental sustainability,” said Wells Griffith, Trump’s adviser.
Mocking laughter echoed through the conference room. A woman yelled, “These false solutions are a joke!” And dozens of people erupted into chants of protest.
The protest was a piece of theater, and so too was the United States’ public embrace of coal and other dirty fuels at an event otherwise dedicated to saving the world from the catastrophic effects of climate change…Monday’s presentation came after a weekend in which the U.S. delegation undercut the talks by joining with major oil producers Russia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in blocking full endorsement of a critical U.N. climate report. The report, by some of the world’s leading scientists, found that the world has barely a decade to cut carbon emissions by nearly half to avoid catastrophic warming.
This is insane.
While career State Department experts work with others at the conference on actual solutions to the crisis, Trump administration political operatives ensure the United States aligns itself with a couple of oil-producing monarchies and an oil-producing oligarchy to simply reject reality. This closely mirrored the G20 summit, where 19 of the 20 nations reiterated their support for climate action and the United States stood in the corner sulking. It’s here we might remind ourselves that the Republican Party is the only major political party in the industrialized world that disputes the scientific consensus that climate change is real and man-made.
It also mirrored Trump’s speech before the United Nations General Assembly, in which he boasted about his Tremendous achievements and the world simply laughed at him:
But this week brought further reminders that this really isn’t a laughing matter. While Griffith backed so-called clean coal (a marketing term) and fracking (which still contributes to warming, can poison nearby drinking water or make it flammable, and can cause earthquake tremors), we learned some more about what’s going on at the South Pole. The Independent has the details:
Nasa has detected new signs large glaciers in East Antarctica are losing ice, raising the prospect of catastrophic sea level rises as global temperatures increase. East Antarctica contains such huge volumes of ice that significant melting has the potential to reshape coastlines around the world; but this part of the continent has long been considered more stable than West Antarctica…
The organisation says the findings hint at widespread changes in the ocean. Scientists have previously warned the Totten Glacier, which is the fastest moving mass of ice in East Antarctica, was shrinking as a result of warming ocean water. Nasa describes this one glacier alone as a “behemoth that contains enough ice to raise sea levels by at least 11 feet [3.3 metres]”.
This is East Antarctica. Earlier this year, we learned that the West Antarctic ice sheet is melting three times as fast as it was a decade ago. The crisis is accelerating. This is why some scientists fear it could spiral beyond our control, devolving into feedback loops we will be powerless to cope with. Elsewhere in his little speech, Griffith wrote off climate concerns as “alarmism.” If you’re not alarmed, you’re a fucking moron.
The situation up in Santaland is no better, as ThinkProgress tells us:
As NOAA reports, “Arctic air temperatures for the past five years (2014-18) have exceeded all previous records since 1900.” And one stunning result of this is that 95 percent of the oldest and thickest Arctic sea ice has disintegrated in just three decades.
The Report Card makes clear that our failure to slow global warming has led to an all-but irreversible Arctic death spiral – which in turn is driving more extreme weather in this country, faster sea level rise everywhere, and more rapid disintegration of the carbon-rich permafrost, which in turn causes even faster global warming.
Human civilization is on the brink. The crisis is here and now.
And the United States of America, which once held itself up to be a leader of nations and an exceptional project of the human race, sends Wells Griffith to the world conference convened to grapple with the crisis to tell those gathered there that we should do more fracking. It is no longer sufficient to call these exhibitions of gross stupidity a national embarrassment. We are betraying our species, and the thousands of others that are dying off now as part of the sixth mass extinction event in this planet’s history.
Is it really funny? Or do we laugh to keep from crying?
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