What if I told you of a deadly disease that will kill more and more people every year? Yes, it’s true.
Though your government previously denied the disease even existed (they called it a “hoax”), now your government, in a stunning political reversal, not only admits the disease exists but predicts that within a hundred years, the disease will kill most, if not all, of the people on earth.
And what if you learned that your government will do nothing about this disease because the leaders believe our fate is sealed. They say, no matter what we do, our descendants will die from this disease?
Because they say humanity is doomed, the government will make no further efforts to stop the disease. Rather than “waste” any more money, the government will cut back on research, and not even try to reduce the spread of the disease.
Most medical doctors and researchers think the government should keep trying. No one knows what future technological advances could emerge from research, and meanwhile, we should try to protect as many people as possible.
Do you agree with the government or with the doctors?
I ask because we actually are living that scenario – a predicted end of the world and a government unwilling to do anything about it.
The disease is called, “global warming.”
Chicago Tribune, 10/5/18 As global temps rise, calls to action fall Trump administration notes 7-degree rise by 2100 but thinks planet’s fate already sealed
By Juliet Eilperin, Brady Dennis and Chris Mooney The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — Deep in a 500-page environmental impact statement released in August, the Trump administration made a startling assumption: On its current course, the planet will warm 7 degrees by the end of this century.
A rise of 7 degrees Fahrenheit compared with pre-industrial levels would be catastrophic, according to scientists.
Many coral reefs would dissolve in increasingly acidic oceans. Parts of Manhattan and Miami would be underwater without costly coastal defenses. Extreme heat waves would routinely smother large parts of the globe.
But the administration did not offer this dire forecast as part of an argument to combat climate change. Just the opposite: The analysis assumes the planet’s fate is already sealed.
The draft statement, issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, was written to justify President Donald Trump’s decision to freeze federal fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks built after 2020.
While the proposal would increase greenhouse gas emissions, the impact statement says, that policy would add just a very small drop to a very big, hot bucket.
“The amazing thing they’re saying is human activities are going to lead to this rise of carbon dioxide that is disastrous for the environment and society. And then they’re saying they’re not going to do anything about it,” said Michael MacCracken, who served as a senior scientist at the U.S. Global Change Research Program from 1993 to 2002.
The world would have to make deep cuts in carbon emissions to avoid this drastic warming, the analysis states.
And that “would require substantial increases in technology innovation and adoption compared to today’s levels and would require the economy and the vehicle fleet to move away from the use of fossil fuels, which is not currently technologically feasible or economically feasible.”
The key words are, “substantial increases in technology innovation” and “not currently technologically feasible or economically feasible.”
We humans can take one of two directions. We can say:
Humanity is going to die, and there’s nothing we can do about it, so don’t we won’t even try to save ourselves. We’ll just let it happen, or
We will not surrender. We’ll do whatever it takes to save the world for our future generations.
The Trump administration has chosen course #1. To increase short-term profits for the automobile and oil industries, the government will do nothing to prevent the eradication of the human species.
Trump has vowed to exit the Paris climate accord and called climate change a hoax.
In the past two months, the White House has pushed to dismantle nearly six major rules aimed at reducing greenhouse gases, deregulatory moves intended to save companies hundreds of millions of dollars.
Trump claims that climate change is a Chinese hoax while simultaneously claiming climate change not only exists but is unstoppable.
The only people not confused by this are Trump’s blind-loyal acolytes who will follow him over a cliff because their love for him exceeds their love for their own children and grandchildren.
If enacted, the administration’s proposals would give new life to aging coal plants; allow oil and gas operations to release more methane into the atmosphere; and prevent new curbs on greenhouse gases used in refrigerators and air-conditioning units.
The vehicle rule alone would put 8 billion additional tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere this century, more than a year’s worth of total U.S. emissions, according to the government’s own analysis.
Despite Trump’s skepticism, federal agencies conducting scientific research have often reaffirmed that humans are causing climate change, including in a major 2017 report that found “no convincing alternative explanation.”
In one internal White House memo, officials wondered whether it would be best to simply “ignore” such analyses.
Essentially, Trump tells you that nothing should be done; on the contrary, we should increase CO2 and methane to bolster corporate profits, because we don’t know how to prevent humanity from dying in a hundred years anyway.
Remember the words “not currently technologically feasible or economically feasible.”
Here are some of the things that were not “currently or economically feasible” in the past hundred years: Electronic computers, jet planes, the internet, smartphones, Voice recognition, digital cameras. television, microwave ovens, space travel, organ transplants, Global Positioning System (GPS), LED bulbs, 3D printers, kidney dialysis machines, pacemakers, lithium batteries, DVDs, the atomic bomb, CRISPR technique for gene splicing.
More than a hundred years ago, few people could have foreseen these developments. Today, Trump and his followers cannot foresee a solution to global warming, so they wish to stop trying, and allow the world to end.
This is the tradeoff: The future of humanity vs. the profits of the auto and oil businesses. Predictably, Donald Trump made the ghastly decision to favor profits over life.
The GOP, which claims to be concerned about the future of a fetus, seems to have no concern about the survival of the entire human race.
Considering Trump’s and the GOP’s many other failings, facilitating the end of the world seems to be part of the pattern.
Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and Monetary Sovereignty (MS) are united by the understanding that a Monetarily Sovereign government cannot unintentionally run short of its own sovereign currency.
Thus, the U.S. federal government, unlike state and local governments, which are monetarily non-sovereign, neither needs nor uses tax dollars to fund its spending.
Federal taxes may find purpose in helping to direct the economy by making some products and services more or less attractive, but federal taxes do not provide spending funds.
Even if federal tax collections were $0, the federal government could continue spending forever.
Further, being sovereign over the U.S. dollar, the federal government has the unlimited ability to set the value of the dollar i.e. control inflation.
Yet a leader of MMT, Professor Randall Wray has written: “Taxes or other obligations (fees, fines, tribute, tithes) drive the currency.”
This forces one to ask, “Specifically, what does ‘drive’ mean?” Does it mean:
1. When taxes are reduced, the value of money falls?
2. If taxes were zero, the value of money would be zero?
3. Do cryptocurrencies, which are not supported by taxes, have no value?
The answers: No, no, and no.
Professor Wray also claims, “the Jobs Guarantee (JG) is a critical component of MMT. It anchors the currency and ensures that achieving full employment will enhance both price and financial stability.”
Specifically, what does “anchors” mean?
1. Since JG does not currently exist, is the U.S. dollar “unanchored”?
2. Does providing college graduates with low-intelligence, ditch-digging jobs enhance price and financial stability?
3. Is forcing people to work morally and economically superior to giving them money and benefits?
Again, no, no, and no.
We often have criticized the JG here, here, here, and elsewhere. JG is an impractical, obsolete concept, more suited to the Industrial Age than to the current and future Artificial Intelligence (AI) age.
The essence of Bill Mitchell’s article can be found in this line:
“We are buffer stock. We must labor to receive benefits.”
“The MMT Job Guarantee . . . is a buffer stock mechanism which unconditionally hires at a fixed priced in order to redistribute labour resources from an inflating sector to a fixed price sector or from a zero bid state to a fixed price state.“
Translation: JG sets salaries at a single, low level, where raises are not allowed, but provides jobs at those levels where none are available.
Is this what our nation needs?
According to Randall Wray, the essence of MMT is JG, and according to Bill Mitchell, the JG is a buffer stock (of human labor) mechanism to control inflation.
Thus Modern Monetary Theory adherents believe the central economics problems addressed by MMT primarily involve employment and unemployment.
Supposedly, the Jobs Guarantee (JG) and a “buffer stock” control over inflation are the key solutions to what ails an economy.
By contrast, Monetary Sovereignty (MS) suggests that providing a job to each person who wants money already is an outmoded view, as robotics augmented with Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly demonstrates every day.
The notion that humans must labor in order to receive the fruits of an economic system reflects a combination of biblical work ethic applied to increasingly obsolete manufacturing methods.
On the horizon lurks the day when very few people will be “employed,” as we now understand the term. Machines will do the vast majority of the work, and people will reap the benefits, without human labor.
Why focus on work when we should focus on benefits?
In short, employment is not what people crave. Rather, they crave money, or more specifically people cravewhat money can buy.
(There’s an old line that goes something like this: “Not many people die whispering, ‘I wish I had spent more of my life in the office.'”).
JG doesn’t address fundamental human desires. It ignores them.
Here is Wray’s summary of his JG version:
1. The JG should pay a living wage with good benefits.
In line with other progressive proposals, the JG wage should establish a national minimum wage at $15 per hour, with free Medicare-style healthcare. It should also provide free childcare to enable parents to participate in the program.
Because you don’t work, you get no money.
Comments:
A “living wage” is not, and never can be, “a national minimum wage” of any specific amount. A “living wage” (whatever that term may mean) in Manhattan or San Francisco is considerably different from a living wage in a Mississippi town.
Further, while adding Medicare and childcare makes JG more palatable, they are not intrinsic parts of JG. They are parts of the Ten Steps to Prosperity.
What about free education, and why not offer “Medicare-style” benefits to those not participating in JG? Is there a moral objection?
2. Congress will appropriate the necessary funds to pay program expenses. No additional taxes will be levied.
Comments:
Correct: Federal taxes do not fund federal spending. No federal program ever requires taxation.
3. The JG should be universal in the sense that it serves every community, offering jobs where people live and providing real benefits to their communities.
Comments:
Here is where the academic ignorance of reality comes to play.
Exactly how will the government be able to “offer jobs where people live”? How will JG offer jobs in every city, every town, every village and every hamlet in every state in the U.S.?
I may have missed it, but I have not seen an MMT description of the department structure and mechanism by which the U.S. government can accomplish this task.
It’s a pie-in-the-sky wish, not a plan.
4. The JG should not devolve to either workfare or welfare. The social safety net should not be dismantled; no existing social services should be eliminated.
Individuals should be able to continue to receive existing benefits if they do not want to work in the JG program.
Comments: But workfare is exactly what JG is. You must work at a minimum-wage job, to get money and many social benefits are contingent on employment and income.
All those laws would need to be changed, somehow.
At the same time, the JG should not provide income support to those that do not work in the program. The JG should be seen as an employment program in which workers are paid for work.
The program should have visible benefits to communities so that the workers in the program are recognized as making positive contributions in return for their wages. The program’s purpose is to provide paid work, not welfare.
Comments:
Do communities really feel that minimum-wage workers — street sweepers, fast food workers, Walmart greeters — must make “positive contributions”?
Workers can be fired for cause—with grievance procedures established to protect their rights, and with conditions on rehiring into the program
Comments:
Visualize millions of minimum-wage workers spread all over the 50 states, each working in different jobs. Who will supervise each of them? What are their rights and who will protect their rights? What are the conditions for firing and rehiring them, and who will do the rehiring?
It’s all very nebulous, as though these human “details” don’t really matter.
5. However, there should be room in the JG for time-limited training and education.
While on-the-job training should be a part of every project, proposals can be solicited for specific training and basic education programs that will prepare workers for jobs in the JG — and, eventually, for work outside the JG. It is important that these are time-limited and that the training is for jobs that actually exist.
Comments:
Who will do the training?
Who will train and supervise the trainers?
Who will create and conduct the basic education programs?
Why “time-limited” and what is the time?
And this is the big one, visualize trying to figure out which jobs “actually exist” and are wanted by each trainee in America.
6. Project implementation and management will be decentralized. There should be diversity in the types of employments and employers —- to help ensure there are projects that appeal to workers and their communities.
Projects should go through several layers of approval before implementation (local, state or regional, federal) and be evaluated at these levels once in progress.
Decentralization helps to protect the program from whatever political winds emanate from the du jour occupant of the White House.
Comments:
The above is so ridiculous it was difficult to keep from laughing as I read it. Think about bureaucrats making sure there is:
–Diversity of types of employments
–Diversity of types of employers
–Several layers of approval (local, state, regional, federal)
–Decentralization
Surely, this cannot be serious. It describes the largest bureaucracy in American history. It would dwarf the military. In of itself, it would eliminate unemployment in America.
7. Where possible, proposals should scale-up existing projects with proven track records and with adequate administrative capacity to add JG workers. Federal spending should not subsidize administrative expenses.
Comments:
Scale up existing projects? That’s like growing companies. Who in the U.S. bureaucracy would do that?
How would these government funded businesses not compete with the private sector that is not blessed with federal funding?
And if administration is not federally funded, who would do the administering?
8. The JG should not be used to subsidize the wages of workers employed by for-profit firms. This distorts markets and is not likely to generate substantial new employment.
According to my formulas, JG should work if you’re buffer stock.
Private business is already heavily subsidized by all levels of government. The JG should not be used as yet another corporate welfare program.
However, private firms will benefit indirectly (and greatly) from the program as it provides a pool of hirable labor and as it contributes to economic growth that improves markets for firms.
Comments:
Are the workers employed by the government or by private industry. If by the government, that competes with private industry.
If employed by a private industry, that subsidizes the wages of that industry.
The notion that private industry is “heavily subsidized” by the government, is mysterious. Does being “subsidized” mean being a vendor? I wouldn’t call that a subsidy.
Or does being subsidized mean receiving tax credits, i.e. being penalized less, which also is not a subsidy.
9. Direct employment by the federal government for the JG should not dominate the program. Most employment should be administered at the local level -— where the workers are, in the communities where they will work.
Comment:
So, it’s partly government workers and partly private workers. So who will hire for the government and in what departments?
And who will be the employment agency for private jobs?
Who will “administer” employment at the local level, in the thousands of communities across this vast nation?
The JG program will probably need to create 15 million new jobs—six times greater than the number of federal employees today.
Comment:
The federal government is going to supervise 15 million new jobs all over America?? Who is qualified to do that? How will they do it?
If all 15 million were to join the federal workforce, supervision of all these new workers would, alone, require hiring a large number of additional federal employees. This would be politically difficult even if the massive scaling-up of the federal workforce were administratively possible.
Comments:
“Politically difficult” is the understatement of the year. It would be functionally a disaster.
The federal government’s role in the direct provision of jobs should be focused on providing projects to underserved communities and workers—after not-for-profits and state and local governments have employed as many as they can.
Comments:
“Underserved communities” are communities with few jobs. But Professor Wray wants the government to find most of the nonexistent jobs in the private sector.
10.Inclusivity and experimentation should be encouraged. The federal government should solicit proposals for novel approaches to job creation. For example, workers’ co-ops could be formed to propose projects in which wages, benefits, and limited materials costs would be covered by the federal government for a specified time period.
Comments:
I have no idea what this means, and I suspect Professor Wray is similarly at sea.
11.Consistent with point 10, project proposals put forth should not be summarily dismissed simply due to political bias.
Comment:
You’ll have to go to the original proposal to figure this one out. I can’t.
12. With decentralization, the types of projects permitted would take account of local laws and rules, including prevailing wage laws and union wage rates. With the JG paying $15 per hour, this means that in many states and localities, rules and laws will prohibit various types of work, including construction. In those areas, JG workers will not build infrastructure, for example.
Comments:
As if the job weren’t complicated enough, the federal bureaucrats would have to keep track of, and follow, “local laws and rules.” That should prove interesting.
13.Exceptions to the uniform wage should be considered, but this should not become the norm. For example, state or local governments might want to subsidize (at their own costs) the federally paid wage of $15 per hour in order to increase wages to some higher level. This might be because of high living costs locally. Or some JG employers might want to offer additional benefits (at their own cost) to workers, including housing allowances for high rent areas.
Comment:
And of course, the federal bureaucrats would be expected to allow for these exceptions when offering federal jobs in each locality. What could possibly go wrong.
14. Limited pilot programs that experiment with different models deviating from what is described above might also be considered. For example, a pilot program run by the federal government, with all participants hired as federal employees, might be tried before the JG is imple-mented on a national scale
Comment:
According to the the 2012 US Census Bureau there were 90,000 local governments of all types in the United States, each with different sets of laws that an employer must consider.
Learning, keeping updated with, and following those myriad laws should be quite a challenge, something the JG folks have not even begun to consider.
Bottom line: JG is a program created by economists who are hoping that “some devil” will be able to figure out the details because these business-ignorant folks don’t bother with such trifles.
The sad part is the thousands of hours MMT people have devoted to the academic side of economics, without understanding business realities.
I personally have spent 50 years managing and owning businesses. The MMT professors, some of whom know me, could have asked for my thoughts before wasting all those years on naivete jobs and “buffer stock,” rather than on human needs.
I resent all those brilliant men and women, who are blind to the facts that jobs are not a human goal, and that no one wants to be buffer stock. These economists have focused on their charts, graphs, and mathematics, and have overlooked the personal element of their science.
The human problem is not jobs; the problem is the income/wealth/power gap between the rich and the rest. Not only does JG not solve the gap problem, but it exacerbates the gap by enticing people and families into a minimum-pay existence.
I have only two good things to say about JG:
It would be expensive, requiring the federal government to pump many billions of stimulus dollars into the economy.
It wouldn’t cost taxpayers one cent, because no federal spending requires or uses tax dollars.
Otherwise, the Ten Steps to Prosperity(below) is a far better, and easier-to-implement program, than JG, and it would narrow that damn Gap.
The single most important problems in economics involve the excessive income/wealth/power Gaps between the have-mores and the have-less.
Wide Gaps negatively affect poverty, health and longevity, education, housing, law and crime, war, leadership, ownership, bigotry, supply and demand, taxation, GDP, international relations, scientific advancement, the environment, human motivation and well-being, and virtually every other issue in economics.
Implementation of The Ten Steps To Prosperity can narrow the Gaps:
Christopher Wray: Yes sir, Mr. President. The FBI will conduct a fair and thorough investigation (wink, wink). We will not accept, let alone look for, damning testimony from any witnesses, even those who try to reach us. This all will be over in a week, just as you ask.
Donald Trump: Good boy. You may keep your job.
Wray: In fact, we have been hiding from those witnesses. Trump: I love you almost as much as I love Putin, Duterte, and Kim
I’m sure you remember when Trump made one of his way too many, ridiculous declarations, this one saying that despite the opinions of the vast majority of climatologists, global warming (aka “climate change”) is a Chinese hoax, “in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive” (his words).
And because global warming doesn’t really exist, why waste precious dollars on research to reduce CO2 and other greenhouse gasses? Also, the coal and oil industries pay big money to compliant politicians.
Well, now that hurricane stormwater is overtaking the eastern seaboard, the Trump administration has a completely different story: Global warming does exist, but why fight it?
Last month, deep in a 500-page environmental impact statement, the Trump administration made a startling assumption: On its current course, the planet will warm a disastrous seven degrees by the end of this century.
A rise of seven degrees Fahrenheit, or about four degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels would be catastrophic, according to scientists.
Many coral reefs would dissolve in increasingly acidic oceans. Parts of Manhattan and Miami would be underwater without costly coastal defenses.
Extreme heat waves would routinely smother large parts of the globe.
But the administration did not offer this dire forecast, premised on the idea that the world will fail to cut its greenhouse gas emissions, as part of an argument to combat climate change.
Just the opposite: The analysis assumes the planet’s fate is already sealed.
The draft statement was written to justify President Trump’s decision to freeze federal fuel-efficiency standards for cars and light trucks built after 2020.
“The amazing thing they’re saying is human activities are going to lead to this rise of carbon dioxide that is disastrous for the environment and society.
And then they’re saying they’re not going to do anything about it,” said Michael MacCracken, who served as a senior scientist at the U.S. Global Change Research Program from 1993 to 2002.
It’s like saying there is no need to do medical research because we all will die of one disease or another. So just save the money.
Live fast; die young. Who cares about your grandchildren? You’ll be dead by the time global warming becomes a real problem.
This is the astounding message the President of the United States wants you to accept.
The world would have to make deep cuts in carbon emissions to avoid this drastic warming, the analysis states.
And that “would require substantial increases in technology innovation and adoption compared to today’s levels and would require the economy and the vehicle fleet to move away from the use of fossil fuels, which is not currently technologically feasible or economically feasible.”
So don’t do the research to find technology innovation. Instead, just burn that coal, use high emission cars, because . . . well, because Trump needs votes from coal miners and money from oil companies.
Scientists predict a four degree Celsius rise by the century’s end if countries take no meaningful actions to curb their carbon output.
In the past two months, the White House has pushed to dismantle nearly half a dozen major rules aimed at reducing greenhouse gases, deregulatory moves intended to save companies hundreds of millions of dollars.
If enacted, the administration’s proposals would give new life to aging coal plants; allow oil and gas operations to release more methane into the atmosphere; and prevent new curbs on greenhouse gases used in refrigerators and air-conditioning units.
The vehicle rule alone would put 8 billion additional tons of carbon dioxidein the atmosphere this century, more than a year’s worth of total U.S. emissions, according to the government’s own analysis.
The right-wing argument is that humans don’t really release CO2 into the air, and anyway, CO2 isn’t a greenhouse gas, and anyway, a warmer world is a good thing, and anyway, plants use CO2 to grow, and anyway cutting CO2 is expensive, and anyway, the coal miners . . . .
Trump’s philosophy: The world will come to an end by 2100. There is no way to prevent it, so don’t even try.
David Pettit, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council who testified against Trump’s freeze of car mileage standards Monday in Fresno, Calif., said his organization is prepared to use the administration’s own numbers to challenge its regulatory rollbacks.
He noted that NHTSA document projects that if the world takes no action to curb emissions, current atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide would rise from 410 parts per million to 789 ppm by 2100.
“I was shocked when I saw it,” Pettit said in a phone interview. “These are their numbers. They aren’t our numbers.”
The right-wing philosophy is: Even though air pollution harms your children’s lungs and shortens their lives, they are going to die someday anyway, so we might as well save profits and keep on polluting.
Using the no-action scenario “is a textbook example of how to lie with statistics,” said MIT Sloan School of Management professor John Sterman.
“First, the administration proposes vehicle efficiency policies that would do almost nothing [to fight climate change].
Then [the administration] makes their impact seem even smaller by comparing their proposals to what would happen if the entire world does nothing.”
This week, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned leaders gathered in New York, “If we do not change course in the next two years, we risk runaway climate change . . . Our future is at stake.”
In the Trump administration, today’s corporate profits take precedence over the future of the world.
Federal and independent research cites “evidence of climate-induced changes,” such as more frequent droughts, floods, severe storms and heat waves, and estimates that seas could rise nearly three feet globally by 2100 if the world does not decrease its carbon output.
Two articles published in the journal Science since late July — both co-authored by federal scientists — predicted that the global landscape could be transformed “without major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions” and declared that soaring temperatures worldwide bore humans’ “fingerprint.”
“With this administration, it’s almost as if this science is happening in another galaxy,” said Rachel Cleetus, policy director and lead economist for the Union of Concerned Scientists’ climate and energy program. “That feedback isn’t informing the policy.”
The only thing that can turn the tide is voter outrage, and the only question is, how much evidence is required to cause your outrage?
The debate comes after a troubling summer of devastating wildfires, record-breaking heat and a catastrophic hurricane — each of which, federal scientists say, signals a warming world.
Ash from wildfires that covered Washington residents’ car hoods this summer, and the acrid smoke that filled their air, has made more voters of both parties grasp the real-world implications of climate change.
And then there’s this article from Inside Climate News:
In its latest retreat from federal action on climate change, the Trump administration moved to lift two more rules on the leaking and uncontrolled release of the potent greenhouse gas methane from oil and natural gas operations.
California Air Resources Board Chair Mary Nichols said, “It’s an attack on public health and continues the administration’s dereliction of duty to protect air quality, taxpayer dollars and the environment.”
Trump’s policies will kill more of your children, and their children, than have any mass-murderer in history.
Not only will millions die unnecessarily early, but the entire world will suffer — all because of the buffoonery of one foolish man.
“Even as someone who has spent more than 40 years thinking about vegetation change looking into the past … it is really hard for me to wrap my mind around the magnitude of change we’re talking about,” said ecologist Stephen Jackson, director of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Southwest Climate Science Adaptation Center.
Some of the predicted ecological shifts are already happening, Jackson said. Where he lives in the Southwest, severe wildfires are destroying ponderosa pine forests that have existed for generations; constant high temperatures and prolonged drought prevent the pines from regenerating in the aftermath.
Jackson noted that the shade provided by ponderosa pines helps preserve snowpack well into the start of summer. The later meltwater is necessary to sustain the streams and rivers on which plants, animals, farms and cities all depend.
The loss of these pines will trigger domino effects all across the watershed, altering landscapes from the mountains to the sea.
Plenty of water but too much heat and dry foliage.
“California wildfires are being magnified & made so much worse by the bad environmental laws which aren’t allowing massive amounts of readily available water to be properly utilized,” the US President wrote on Twitter. “It is being diverted into the Pacific Ocean. Think of California with plenty of Water,” he added. “Nice!”
The problem with his tweets, according to environmental scientists and California water experts, is that there’s way more than enough water available to fight the wildfires in California.
Plus, they say, Trump is ignoring the critical issue of climate change, which has raised global temperatures and intensified droughts, making wildfires in the West bigger and more likely.
“This seems to be a confused attempt to conflate the terrible California wildfires with our always contentious debates over water,” said Peter Gleick, an environmental scientist and former MacArthur Fellow who is president emeritus of the Pacific Institute in Oakland, California.
“(Trump) implied there wasn’t enough water to fight the fires in California because of our water policies — which is complete nonsense.
There’s plenty of water to fight the fires. We don’t even use that much water to fight the fires, but there’s plenty.
Three of the state’s largest bodies of water are very close to these fires. It’s just ridiculous.”
I’ll tell you what’s ridiculous. Trump and the Republicans intentionally damaging the earth and the futures of all its inhabitants, for the sake of immediate, corporate profits. That’s what’s ridiculous.
And you know what else is ridiculous. People standing by, and letting these boobs destroy our world. That’s really ridiculous.
What is the solution?
There is an election coming up this November. You know the solution.
Don’t sit on your butt, allowing it all to happen to you.
#Monetary Sovereignty - Mitchell 