To hear President Trump describe it, the U.S. is beset by emergencies. We allegedly have an energy emergency, a government waste emergency and a foreign trade emergency.
Trump has called America a “failing nation … in decline,” with mental patients, criminals and rapists surging across our borders. He says we suffer from “bloodshed, chaos, and violent crime” committed by “thugs and tyrants and fascists, scoundrels and rogues” who are leading us into “servitude and ruin.”
There is a method to this alarmism.
The New Republic notes that the far right’s rhetoric is “suffused with dark talk of impending calamities. The road to authoritarianism is paved with this trope — the dire pending calamity that only the strongman has seen, and which only he can solve.”
At the same time, Trump is distracting America from its true emergency. Worse, he and his team are methodically destroying the federal policies that were doing something about it.
Global climate change is no longer a future crisis — it is a clear and present danger to the national economy, to the health, safety and quality of American lives, to our natural resources and to our energy security.
Nevertheless, Trump and his team have buried their heads so deep in the sand that all they see is oil.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright promises to “deprioritize” climate change and emphasize fossil fuel production. America’s top military and intelligence experts have warned since the 1980s that climate change threatens national security. But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says his department “does not do climate change crap.” Trump has even created his own cancel culture, whereby federal officials are not free to use scores of “woke” words, including “clean energy,” “climate crisis,” “climate science” and “pollution.”
As Team Trump dwells inside its bubble of false facts and alternative realities, the rest of America is experiencing a relentless succession of tragedies. The human and economic costs are devastating.
Hurricane Helene killed at least 221 people last fall. In 2023, more than 100 people in the historic town of Lahaina perished in a wildfire. Fires destroyed entire neighborhoods and took 29 lives in Los Angeles earlier this year. Last summer, Phoenix experienced 113 consecutive days over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the longest such streak ever recorded. Thousands of Americans (more than 2,300 in 2023) are dying in heat waves. The death toll has climbed 117 percent during the last quarter-century.
The most recent data show that nearly 10 percent of America’s businesses lost money because of extreme weather in 2022. After each major weather disaster, 40 percent of affected businesses never reopen, and 90 percent fail within two years. Climate change is increasing the price of consumer goods. Disaster spending is draining money from other essential government functions. Homeowners are straining under rising insurance premiums and falling property values in disaster-prone places. Millions of Americans are moving away from those places, depriving at-risk communities of tax revenues for public services.
The First Street Foundation says real estate values in America could drop by $1.5 trillion over the next 30 years. Experts warn that at-risk properties are already overvalued, creating the conditions for another mortgage crisis like the one that put the economy into a tailspin in 2007.
Oil companies and banks that had promised to become carbon-neutral are now capitulating to Trump by canceling their pledges. BP is upping its annual oil and gas investment by $10 billion while cutting renewable energy investment by more than $5 billion. Citing political pressure, big banks and asset managers are quitting climate-action coalitions, including the Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo.
Denial remains a Republican Party doctrine, even though 99.5 percent of the nation’s congressional districts have experienced at least one billion-dollar or bigger weather disaster over the last dozen years. The real hoax is the oil cartel’s long campaign to discredit good science, greenwash and elect allies to public office so the government keeps subsidizing our oil addiction.
All the while, fossil fuel pollution collects in the atmosphere like a blanket that holds in the sun’s heat. Scientists measure the blanket’s density in parts per million — about 350 parts per million is just right, but it is approaching 430 parts per million today, the highest in more than 2 million years.
Last year, the U.S. put an average of 17.5 million tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every day. Significant parts of the U.S. are already becoming deadly, unaffordable and uninhabitable.
The good news is that pollution-free energy from sunlight, wind and other renewable resources is readily available and cheaper than fossil fuels. U.S. investment in those resources reached $280 billion in 2023. The bad news is that oil, natural gas and coal still provide about 80 percent of America’s and the world’s energy.
Writing in Foreign Affairs, energy expert Daniel Yergin and two colleagues point out that the clean energy transition has been additive rather than transformative. In other words, it has kept the share of fossil fuels from rising, but it has not put a dent in their dominance.
Skeptics cite the intermittency of sunlight and wind as barriers to their use, but the real problem is the repeated waxing and waning of national and international political will. Democratic presidents have consistently led the charge against climate change, while Republican presidents have retreated. As a result, billion-dollar-plus weather disasters in the U.S. have grown from an annual average of nine over the last 45 years to 18 over the last five.
Pressure from voters and consumers could change this trend. Over 70 percent of Americans accept that global warming is underway, and 56 percent expect extreme weather to affect their communities over the next decade. Yet voters elected Trump, and consumers are more worried about the price of eggs.
This is the real national emergency. Only the president can make it official, but he won’t. It’s up to voters to reorder their priorities — and force Congress to do the same.
Until then, we are turning nature into an enemy rather than an ally and depriving our children of a stable and secure world.
William S. Becker is a former regional director at the U.S. Department of Energy and author of several books on climate change and national disaster policies, including the “100-Day Action Plan to Save the Planet,” published by St. Martin’s Griffin, and “The Creeks Will Rise: People Co-Existing with Floods,” published by the Chicago Review Press.
