Posted on October 5, 2017 by James Holtkamp
The award-winning 1940 movie Fantasia includes a segment with a bevy of hippopotami in tutus preforming the Dance of the Hours. It is a remarkable depiction of an alternate reality in which the law of gravity doesn’t seem to apply. The 2017 version of an alternate reality is the Trump Administration’s perspective on climate change. Like the hippos in Fantasia, Messrs. Trump and Pruitt and other Administration officials are trying to ignore inexorable laws of nature and human behavior. Unlike the hippos, they will not succeed (reserving judgment on whether they will look as nice in their tutus).
In June, Mr. Trump announced the withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, claiming that it was a ”bad deal” that would “kill American jobs.” With Nicaragua belatedly deciding to sign on to the Agreement, the only two countries left that are not participating in the Agreement are the U.S. and Syria. (Nicaragua, by the way, initially refused to sign the Agreement, not because it thought the Agreement was too stringent, but rather that it wasn’t stringent enough.)
Meanwhile, Category 5 hurricanes march through the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, epic droughts wither the Pacific Coast, sea lanes in the Arctic are open for the first time in recorded memory, and entire islands disappear beneath rising seas. The human cost of these and other climate-related events is immense.
The preamble to the Paris Agreement identifies the following climate-vulnerable areas of society:
· Poverty-stricken populations
· Food security
· Quantity and quality of jobs
· Human rights
· Health
· Indigenous peoples
· Local communities
· Migrants
· Children
· Gender Equality
· Empowerment of women
· Intergenerational equity
· Ecosystem integrity
· Justice
The rejection of the Agreement by the Trump Administration represents a denial of the broad impact of climate change on society as articulated in the Agreement. Like the hippos in the dance, the Administration wants to live in a world in which the laws of nature don’t apply. But real-world hippos and the rest of the inhabitants of the planet (including all of us and our children and grandchildren) will suffer the consequences of their denial of reality.
Tags: Paris Agreement