Washington Post: Trump 'Complicit' in Hurricane Florence
The Washington Post editorial board in a piece published on Tuesday labeled President Donald Trump “complicit” in the creation of Hurricane Florence.
The dangerous, Category 4 storm is expected to make landfall in the Carolinas by Friday, packing winds over 100 miles an hour and bringing torrential rains, AccuWeather forecasted.
The Post’s editorial board gave Trump credit for warning residents in the projected storm path to be prepared and follow local officials’ guidance, but then blamed him in part for allowing the conditions to exist the precipitated the hurricane’s formation.
“[W]hen it comes to extreme weather, Mr. Trump is complicit,” the editorial argued. “He plays down humans’ role in increasing the risks, and he continues to dismantle efforts to address those risks.”
“It is hard to attribute any single weather event to climate change,” the board acknowledged. “But there is no reasonable doubt that humans are priming the Earth’s systems to produce disasters.”
The editorial goes on to cite experts saying the oceans are warming as a result of climate change, and it chides Trump for attacking the pillars of former President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan.
The editors concluded, writing Trump “has cemented the GOP’s legacy as one of reaction and reality denial.”
As of Wednesday afternoon, according to WLTX in Columbia, South Carolina, Florence was about 485 miles from land.
The WLTX 11 a.m. Wednesday update can be seen here:
Last month, the Trump administration announced its intention to replace Obama’s Clean Power Plan with the Affordable Clean Energy Rule, which would give individual states more authority to regulate green house gas emissions from coal-fired power plants, NPR reported.
Obama’s plan had called for cutting carbon emissions by one-third by 2030, which essentially would have ended coal-powered electricity production in the U.S. Critics argued such a draconian move would have caused energy prices to spike.
The Institute for Energy Research found that 45 states would see double digit increases in wholesale energy costs; and in 16 of those states, it would be 25 percent or higher.
Among Trump’s early decisions as president was to remove the United States from the Paris Climate Accord entered into by Obama.
“Not only does this deal subject our citizens to harsh economic restrictions, it fails to live up to our environmental ideals,” Trump said in June 2017.
He continued, “As someone who cares deeply about the environment, which I do, I cannot in good conscience support a deal that punishes the United States — which is what it does – the world’s leader in environmental protection, while imposing no meaningful obligations on the world’s leading polluters.”
Trump further noted, “Even if the Paris Agreement were implemented in full, with total compliance from all nations, it is estimated it would only produce a two-tenths of one degree…Celsius reduction in global temperature by the year 2100.”
At the turn of this year, the president noted the record cold temperatures the East was experiencing and quipped “perhaps we could use a little bit of good old Global Warming.”
In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record. Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 29, 2017
A few days later, former Vice President Al Gore tweeted that he believed climate change was the culprit behind the freezing temperatures.
Gore, who starred in the Academy Award-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” (2006) about the perils of global warming, tweeted, “It’s bitter cold in parts of the U.S, but…that’s exactly what we should expect from the climate crisis.”
It’s bitter cold in parts of the US, but climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann explains that’s exactly what we should expect from the climate crisis. https://t.co/6UfJ9Xxpq6
— Al Gore (@algore) January 4, 2018
Meteorologist Joe Bastardi, who worked for AccuWeather for over three decades, completely disagreed with Gore’s assessment, calling the view “flat out insanity and deception.”
https://twitter.com/BigJoeBastardi/status/948904944723251201
“To tell the public that events that have occurred countless times before with no climate change attribution, is just that, is not science…It’s climate ambulance chasing, nothing more,” he said.
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