Looks like I’m going to have to change course – along with many other environmentalists who woke up on Wednesday facing a landslide against us and our vision of American climate defense.
One thing is obvious. I need to switch from whatever I’ve been doing to popularize federal programs that reduce emissions and build local climate protections. Today those programs are on death row. However, if federal efforts to combat climate change will soon be dismantled, presumably there are still plenty of climate-worried officials and lawmakers in dozens of states, cities and towns who will pick up the effort. They won’t have as much money as the Inflation Reduction Act and the other big federal programs, but . . .
Future ClimateDog letters should focus on these second-string efforts and identify ways that subscribers can help them along.
It’s one thing for me to understand that my editorial approach needs to change, now that America’s programs fighting climate change have suddenly been weakened. It’s another to realize that my basic thinking process has been repudiated by half the country. Does that process need to change too?
My belief system and my values have been based on
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The paramount importance of facts, and the need to search and challenge in establishing them.
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The importance of understanding cause-and-effect in particular.
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The belief that any judicious person values facts and understanding.
I’ve spent many portions of my life searching for and promoting facts. And professionally and personally, I’ve been among other people doing the same:
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thirteen years in a single traditional American public school building,
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six years in elite University classrooms,
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decades of trying to move troubled tech startups onto solid ground, and
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five years building board games (like Monopoly) that train salespeople to identify the effects their customers want and to show how their products or services will cause them.
This week I finally woke up to see that 72 million Americans do not share the attitude toward facts that I developed. I think not of Trump’s lies, crimes, and inanities, but in particular of the falsehoods and cause-and-effect untruths underlying his major platform planks.
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Tariffs are known to do far greater damage to import consumers than to exporters.
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Recent immigrants to our country, especially illegals, have far lower crime rates than virtually all other American groups.
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Tax cuts for corporations and the rich have proven over and over again not to help government coffers or the economy overall.
Of course, Trump’s push to impose serious tariff barriers around the United States, to round up and deport millions of immigrants, and to cut income taxes – all based on false facts and logic – may not be fully enacted. The results of faulty reasoning may not in the end be horrific. But that faulty reasoning, and lots more contained in the proposals of Republicans and their Project 2025, seem likely to do a whole lot of economic and social damage over the coming years.
The biggest risk? They stand a good chance of dooming America and the planet to accelerated warming!
I’ll be off on a different tack starting with next week’s newsletter. Any suggestions from readers about changing the topics from here on will be welcome. And I welcome thoughts on how I should adapt my belief system about how the world works to better accommodate how this country works. Please leave a comment here or at dstookey@gmail.com.