The Cost of Trump
Watching how Donald Trump is able to manipulate a large percentage of Americans is sad and at the same time extremely frightening. Trump has convinced his followers that his narrowly defined state of the economy [1] and their private, personal beliefs are more important than the suffering of more than 7 million Americans infected by the Covid19 virus and the 200,000+ deaths caused by the pandemic so far in 2020. Yet, since January 2020, Donald Trump was aware of the danger of this virus to humanity and the medical science community’s recommended set of practices that could have limited the loss of life by a predicted 100,000 or more lives. He needed to immediately enact programs based on science and the recommendations of thousands of MDs and scientists in the US and the global community rather than following his ignorant “do nothing” approach, which so far has caused as many as 100,000 unnecessary American deaths. Yet, we can consider this huge loss of life and the associated destruction of the US economy as only a small down payment on the final cost to humanity and life on Earth if we continue to allow Trump to ignore science and traditional risk analyses, the tools that we have used to base most of our critical decisions in the past. If you think the Covid19 pandemic is costly in economic terms and human lives, brace yourself for the coming Tsunami level costs of the Trump-Republican responses to the greatest threat ever to humanity and planet Earth if Trump is reelected.
Humanity has reached a stage, where for the first time in our history, scientists say we are significantly altering the Earth’s ecosystem through our human activity. These alterations include global warming, changes in the atmosphere, oceans and soil, loss of habitable and agricultural land, massive wildfires, more frequent and stronger hurricanes and extreme numbers of animal and plant extinctions. But here again, we find the same huge number of Americans who continue to follow the dangerous preaching of Donald Trump and the Republican Party, who ignore the warnings and recommendations of thousands of scientists and on how to mitigate the impacts of climate change and global warming. We are at least 30 years late in implementing changes that would reduce the rise in temperature of the Earth and help prevent the massive loss of life and huge cost of infrastructure destruction predicted by scientists and economists worldwide. In the US, under Trump, science based solutions are being ignored in favor of “business as usual” practices that greatly benefit wealthy individuals and huge corporations. Trump goes even further by eliminating environmental protection regulations that were imposed by prior US administrations over decades to slow climate change and global warming.
The UN IPCC predicts that unless we implement recommended science based climate change mitigation over the next 20 years we will see the creation of more than 150M global climate refugees who can no longer survive in their current habitats. The cost of adaptation and reconstruction of destroyed infrastructure by 2050, worldwide, is estimated to be as high as $70 trillion or more. [2] In the longer term, following the Trump/Republican policies on a worldwide basis could lead to a loss of 1 to 2 billion lives. If we continue to follow the lead of narcissists, grifters and profiteers like Donald Trump, who deny good science and business solutions in the 21st Century, in favor of practices that destroy our environment, millions will die in a financially bankrupt world to satisfy his sociopathic tendencies.
On a positive note, because non-polluting renewable energy (RE) power plants are proving to be less costly than traditional coal, oil and gas based systems, 80% of new power systems built last year were solar and wind, slowing the movement towards gas powered power systems. [3] Gas powered systems might burn cleaner than oil and coal, but the fracking required to obtain natural gas releases methane, a gas with a negative global warming impact of 84 times that of CO2 makes the overall natural gas process more expensive and a greater contributor to global warming than solar and wind based energy generation. [3] Instead of following the science and the business data and encouraging the deployment of clean renewable energy, Trump has placed roadblocks and cut funding for the development of solar, wind, geothermal, hydro-power and other RE energy systems. Worse, Trump has pulled the US out of numerous international organizations and treaties that were established to cooperatively reduce the future huge loss of life numbers and the enormous financial costs of replacing destroyed infrastructure worldwide caused by global warming. All these actions and their continued direction under a second Trump administration, will be irrevocably destructive to all economies, especially the US, and far worse, more deadly than the Covid19 virus.
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/07/climate/ipcc-climate-report-2040.html
[3] Al Gore: Live Interview on CNN GPS, October 11, 2020
