In light of Nov. 8, these things I know:
Now 80, I will not be alive when and if the Democrats are returned to office.
Nor will I be alive when the influx of global warming refugees moving inland from the commonwealth’s disappearing shorelines arrive in Franklin County.
On the other hand, who knows? I might live to 2020, or even 2024, at which point in time the pundits tell us the country will be ready for another change in political party after eight years. And you know how accurate the pundits and polls were on Tuesday.
Like millions of others, I have spent my post-election musing on two sides of the same coin: How the hell did this happen and what’s going to happen now?
The common notion is that the election was a repudiation of the status quo, an “ejectionist” election ala Brexit. I get it. For most voters the status quo excluded them to the point that they were willing to elect anyone who would smash the status quo and start over.
Here’s the good news: Under Trump, there is likely to be no war with Russia, as might well have occurred if Clinton had prevailed. And the TPP is hopefully dead. Millions of Americans who have felt ignored by the Washington and Wall Street elites now feel they have a voice. That said, foreign relations and trade policy will likely be in the hands of business-friendly Republicans who will ultimately throw working people overboard in the interest of shareholders while Trump voters reassure themselves that at least “their guy” is in charge. The same guy who has promised to reduce taxes for everyone, especially the people in his income bracket.
So the election is a repudiation of the establishment. But who will actually be running things in the months ahead? Same old, same old. The army of lobbyist-officials will increase their ranks given that for the first time in American history we have a “businessman” at the helm of the ship of state.
“As of June,” according to Reuter’s, “there were 12,553 federal lobbyists registered in Washington, down from 14,800 at the end of 2008, and well below a record 15,137 in 2007, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit group that tracks such activities. A report in The Nation in 2014 suggested that while the number of registered lobbyists was a decrease since 2002, lobbying activity was increasing and “going underground” as lobbyists use “increasingly sophisticated strategies” to obscure their activity.
Now here is the bad news, the really terrible news, worse than all the other bad news combined. Instead of continuing to mitigate the negative impacts of climate change, we will increase our nation’s man-made carbon emissions. The makers of SUVs, large pick-up trucks and Volkswagen will love Trump’s climate “leadership.”
For the last eight years, the Obama administration has been using every regulatory lever at its disposal to push down U.S. greenhouse gases — aiming for a 28 percent cut below 2005 levels by 2025. Obama has also been trying to coax countries like China to participate in a global climate deal, in which every country would voluntarily pledge to restrain its emissions and meet regularly at the U.N. to ratchet up ambitions over time.
Trump, the business man, called global warming a Chinese hoax, invented to hurt the U.S. economically. He couldn’t have been blunter about this. He also tapped Myron Ebell, an avowed climate denier, to head his EPA transition team.
Trump has said, straight up, he wants to scrap all the major regulations that President Obama painstakingly put in place to reduce U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, including the Clean Power Plan. With Republicans now controlling Congress, this is easily possible. Just pass a bill preventing the EPA from regulating CO2. With Republican control of the Senate and the House, this should be no problem.
Actually, he wants to get rid of the EPA entirely. “What they do is a disgrace,” he has said. Again, if Congress follows, he’d have the power to get rid of other regulations on mercury pollution, on ozone, on coal ash, and more in the interest of the bottom line. Regulations are the bane of Republican’s economic existence.
Our president-elect has said he wants to repeal all federal spending on clean energy, including research and dvelopment for wind, solar, nuclear power, and electric vehicles.
Finally, Trump has said he wants to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, recently made International law. The only hope is that technically, the U.S. can’t officially withdraw for four years. But let’s get real, the Trump and company can simply ignore it.
Olympia Snowe, the former Republican senator from Maine commenting on Trump’s impact on the Republican Party, said “The question is how we unravel going forward. I fear the effects could be long-lasting. It’s tragic.”
“America,” Snowe said, “is confronting the pressing and pervasive threat of global climate change. This is not a Democratic or a Republican issue; not a liberal or a conservative issue. This is a human issue …”
Shelburne Falls resident John Bos writes frequently about environmental issues. He invites dialogue at john01370@gmail.com.