Dissident Politics: Update: MAGA’s ongoing war to enhance global warming

Starving polar bear -- not adapting well to

MAGA's efforts to increase global warming

The effort by Trump and MAGA elites to obliterate public concern for global warming continues. New MAGA policies continue to expand the power and unaccountability of special interests that profit from polluting. As always with Trump and MAGA policy, profits, wealth, and power are privatized and trickled up to elites and allied corporations, while the public eats the costs, absorbs the harms, while its wealth and power melts away. By now, this pro-global warming effort has caused vast damage to America’s ability to adapt to global warming. Despite constant MAGA efforts to make the issue go away, majority public opinion is still concerned about global warming. For the most part, most of the public wants the basically the opposite of what Trump and MAGA elites are doing. Not surprisingly, Trump and MAGA elites don’t care enough about public opinion to stop doing what they are doing.

Helping the ice melt faster

An article, ‘Truly Devastating’: Trump Ends Federal Funding for Key Arctic Climate Report, exemplifies Trump’s effort to block research. The goal is hide and downplay data showing broad and deep impacts of global warming. Here, Trump just shuts down funding for important research that policymakers would need to help them deal with the issue. But as most reasonable people know by now, informed policymakers working for the public interest is absolutely not how MAGA governs.

Here, Trump stopped federal funding for an annual National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration report that examined and reported on the state of the Arctic. That part of the planet is warming significantly faster than other regions as continued fossil fuel extraction and carbon dioxide emissions continue to increase global temperatures. For context, the last 10 years have been the 10 warmest on record for the Arctic. Trump stopping this research, which has been ongoing for over years, cripples our ability to track and assess Arctic region changes from year to year. Affected people and communities around the world are kept ignorant, as MAGA elites intend.

Past perspectives on the present era of abrupt Arctic climate change

Deregulation by disempowering regulators

AP reporting in an article, Trump EPA moves to repeal landmark ‘endangerment finding’ that allows climate regulation, hits squarely on the core MAGA tactic of gutting federal regulatory agencies that often worked for the public interest. MAGA policy has been to subvert and corrupt federal agencies into entities that serve special interest wealth and power concerns. MAGA simply guts wealth and power serving the public interest and individuals. The public interest includes reasonably protecting the environment.

The proposed EPA rule rescinds a 2009 finding that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. The “endangerment finding” is the legal basis of a slew of climate regulations under the Clean Air Act for motor vehicles, power plants and other pollution sources that are heating the planet. Trump’s and MAGA’s goal is to obliterate those regulations. That would allow and foster more pollution for profit for elites, with morse costs and damages socialized onto all of us.

MAGA’s cynical liar excuse is that environmental regulations were intended to regulate large sectors of the economy out of existence. Yes, regulations usually impose costs, but reasonable regulation is part of the cost of serving the public interest. We get the shaft while a few elites get our wealth and power. Trump and MAGA elites are deregulating the public interest out of existence.

Q: Based on evidence including that discussed or cited here, is Trump’s and MAGA elite’s efforts to (1) hide inconvenient environment research, and (2) get rid of environmental regulation, mostly beneficial for the public interest or for affected special interests?