Trying to keep up with the perfidy of the Trump administration is a mug’s game, but sometimes I’m a mug. And so, in a small effort to get out ahead of these deceits before they become conventional wisdom, I’m going to write about two statements from the administration, one yesterday and one more than a month old that I missed. I just sent you a long newsletter a couple of days ago, and I don’t want to overburden you with stuff (who needs more outrage anyway?) so I’ll try to be brief.

First, and most consequentially, the news leaked on the 24th of May that the E.P.A. (which definitely needs a new name) is planning to “eliminate all limits on greenhouse gases from coal and gas-fired power plants in the United States.” Internal documents reviewed by the New York Times (shout out to Lisa Friedman for some enterprising reporting) show that

In its proposed regulation, the agency argued that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from power plants that burn fossil fuels “do not contribute significantly to dangerous pollution” or to climate change because they are a small and declining share of global emissions. Eliminating those emissions would have no meaningful effect on public health and welfare, the agency said.

But as Friedman points out, those power plants account for a third of America’s greenhouse gas emissions, trailing only transportation (where the government is also throwing in the towel by derailing the EV transition). Here’s the key part of their explanation and the thing that should not go unchallenged:

In proposing to lift regulations on power plants, the E.P.A. points to the fact that the U.S. share of global power sector emissions represented about 3 percent of worldwide greenhouse gases in 2022, down from 5.5 percent in 2005. So, it argued, even if American power plants erased all their greenhouse gases from the power sector, the risk to public health would not be “meaningfully” improved.

Attorneys who represent utility companies said they agree that the sector is a small part of the global climate problem. “The argument is a solid argument,” said Jeffrey R. Holmstead, who served in the E.P.A. during both Bush administrations and now represents utility companies as a lawyer for the firm Bracewell.

But if you think about it for even a second, you realize it’s the furthest thing from a solid argument. Three percent of the greatest problem the world faces is a big part—bigger than any other single share outside U.S. cars and trucks and China’s power generation and industry. The very nature of global warming is that it comes from everywhere and must be solved everywhere. If three percent of the problem—1.5 million metric tons—was not significant enough to be worth taking action on, then there would be no need for Japan to do anything at all (everything they do—power plants, cars, factories—adds us to less than American power plants. Ditto Indonesia, Iran, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, every single country in Europe, every single country in Africa, every single country in South America. No one would have to do anything, and there would be no action at all.

The entire point of the entire thirty-five year effort to deal with climate change is that everyone has to be involved. That’s the whole point of the Paris agreement. We’re of course no longer involved in that process—the country that has put the most emissions in the air is also the only one not trying to help solve it. Which is sick. But arguing that no one should do anything: well, what can I say? It’s not just self-serving, it’s intellectually dishonest. Which—well, we should strive not to be. And once upon a time we usually did, back until January 20.

Not as important but just as egregious was something that energy secretary Christopher Wright said in a speech he gave at Golden Colorado in early April. Speaking to the staff of the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, “repeatedly minimized” the impact of climate change. Because many of the lab’s staff had lived through the 2021 Marshall Fire that killed two people and wiped out nearly a thousand homes in one of the fastest-moving and scariest wildfires in American history (if you want to see some scared people, here’s video of parents and children in the local Chuck E. Cheese that day), he addressed that blaze in particular. To attribute it to climate change, he said, was “simply to not look at the data,” because wildfires in America had “peaked a hundred years ago. “

This is the kind of lying-by-statistic that has been part and parcel of the climate denial movement from the start. Acreage burned by wildfire indeed peaked in the 1920s, and everyone who’s taken even the slightest look at the data knows the reason. As Jon Greenberg at Politifact explained in 2021:

In a 2018 article, Randal O’Toole, a senior fellow with the libertarian Cato Institute, included that same chart showing the dramatic fall in wildfires based on federal data. O’Toole is skeptical of broad claims of climate change. But O’Toole offered this chart with a stinging caption.

“Some people use the data behind this chart to argue against anthropogenic climate change. The problem is that the data before about 1955 are a lie.”

O’Toole noted that at the turn of the 20th century, Congress told the Forest Service to suppress fires. This mandate put the federal agency in direct conflict with landowners in the southeast. The Forest Service was steadfast in its opposition to all fires. But the southeaster landowners burned their forests every four or five years to control underbrush.

“Perhaps 20% of forests would be burned each year, compared with less than 1% of forests burned through actual wildfires,” O’Toole wrote. “The Forest Service responded by counting all fires in that state, prescribed or wild, as wildfires.”

Across much of the country, the huge fires of the 1910s and 1920s were also linked to the unregulated and undisciplined logging of the period. In the Adirondacks of upstate New York, for instance, where I have spent much of my life, and where the wet woods is sometimes called the ‘asbestos forest,” there were huge blazes in 1903 and 1908. As the truly wonderful Adirondack history museum at Blue Mountain Lake explains,

Adirondack loggers were not known, at the time, for following safe logging practices. Fire prevention was not a chief concern. Most lumbermen were resistant to the idea of “limbing” or removing all tree branches, usually from conifer trees, before discarding the tops. This was because treetops were seen not only as waste, but the practice was also time-consuming.

Woods bosses hated to waste time. Instead of cutting the limbs off of treetops so that they would lie flat on the ground and decompose properly, loggers would simply discard the tops unlimbed. The treetops formed dense tangles of air-dried wood that became huge piles of tinder, needing only a spark to ignite. Often, as seen in 1903, railroad locomotives passing by would supply this spark.

The fires of the last few decades, by contrast, are caused—and no one except ideologues like Wright argue with this—by the change in temperature, which extends fire season and has also allowed infestations of insects like the pine bark beetle that kill trees and leave large tracts of standing tinder. The numbers are insane, and they come from the federal government. Apparently the purge of the NOAA website is not yet complete, because you can still find a page there with this account:

A 2016 study found climate change enhanced the drying of organic matter and doubled the number of large fires between 1984 and 2015offsite link in the western United States. A 2021 study supported by NOAA concluded that climate change has been the main driver of the increase in fire weather in the western United States.

The Marshall Fire in particular has been studied in depth, and here is an account by wildfire scientist Natasha Stavros (who has been evacuated in a number of fires) that calls the Marshall blaze the “perfect example” of a climate-caused conflagration. After aggregating the relevant data about snowfall, rainfall, and temperature, she wrote “this fire is the definition of a climate fire.”

So Secretary Wright was gaslighting the NREL community—which doubtless included survivors of that fire; that the audience knew he was gaslighting them made it worse. This was a power move, a way of declaring that the work they did, the truths and technologies they had uncovered, did not matter.

It was particularly gross since Golden Colorado was also the location of an important speech by the president perhaps most devoted to telling the truth no matter what, Jimmy Carter. He had founded NREL, and on the first SunDay there in 1978 he said

Nobody can embargo sunlight. No cartel controls the Sun. Its energy will not run out. It will not pollute the air; it will not poison our waters. It’s free from stench and smog. The Sun’s power needs only to be collected, stored, and used.

We know that most of the technology for using the Sun’s power already exists. And in my youth, as in many of yours, there were millions of windmills around the rural areas of our country. Hundreds of small damsites provided electric power. Some 10,000 years ago, in your area, Indians were using solar principles to heat dwellings at Mesa Verde and elsewhere.

The historically brief availability of low-cost energy from fossil fuels drove much of that early solar technology into temporary disuse, but now we are rebuilding on those earlier techniques.

Indeed. As most of you know we’re reviving that SunDay on Sept 21—the fall equinox—with a nationwide celebration of renewable energy, part of the protest against the lies and inaction of this administration. There are now more than 4,000 suns in our global gallery—please draw your own, inspired this week by Jarrod Baniqued in the Philippines.

Teaser image credit: Author supplied.