Taibbi: Why Aren't We Talking More About Trump's Nihilism?

[babylonsister]

October 1, 2018 12:28PM ET
Taibbi: Why Aren’t We Talking More About Trump’s Nihilism?
The White House now says we might as well pollute because global catastrophe is inevitable
By Matt Taibbi


While America was consumed with the Brett Kavanaugh drama last week, the Washington Post unearthed a crazy tidbit in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) latest environmental impact statement.

The study predicts a rise in global temperatures of about four degrees Celsius, or seven degrees Fahrenheit, by the year 2100. Worse, it asserts global warming is such an inevitable reality, there’s no point in reducing auto emissions, as we’re screwed anyway.

“The emissions reductions necessary to keep global emissions within this carbon budget could not be achieved solely with drastic reductions in emissions from the U.S. passenger car and light truck vehicle fleet,” is how the report put it.

To make a real difference, it adds we’d have to “move away from the use of fossil fuels,” which is “not currently technologically feasible or economically practicable.”

There’s been just a flutter of media attention about this, mostly focusing on the hypocrisy. Trump, as is his wont, has at one point or another occupied basically every inch of territory on the spectrum of global warming opinions.

He went from urging President Obama to act to prevent “catastrophic and irreversible consequences… for our planet” (2009), to calling global warming a Chinese conspiracy (2012), to calling it an “expensive hoax” (2013), and “bullshit” (2014), to switching up again during the election to concede the existence of “naturally occurring” (i.e., not man-made) climate change.

Now comes this Linda Blair-style head turn. The NHTSA report deftly leaps past standard wing-nut climate denial and lands on a new nihilistic construct, in which action is useless precisely because climate change exists and is caused by fossil fuels.

The more you read of this impact statement, the weirder it seems. After the document lays out its argument for doing nothing, it runs a series of bar graphs comparing the impact of various action plans with scenarios in which the entire world did nothing (labeled the “no action” alternative).

These absurd illustrations make Thomas Friedman’s time-traveling efforts to graph the future seem like the work of a Nobel laureate.

“A textbook example of how to lie with statistics,” is how MIT professor John Sterman described it to the Post.

more...

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-white-house-climate-change-731440/

[notdarkyet]

1. Trump doesn't care if the planet collapses due to fossil fuels, he will be dead soon and the

More lives and earth destroyed is his goal. He does not care about children or grandchildren. Only himself and he will be gone so he doesn’t care about anyone else. He is a nihilist, a destroyer.

[dalton99a]

2. +1

[enough]

3. If they had said this the day after he took office, it would have been an outrage.

Now it’s just swirling around with all the other insanity emanating from Trumpworld. It didn’t take long for us to become completely lobotomized.