Trump’s fantasy-based circus act is going to have deadly consequences

Let us, for a moment, imagine a piece of legislation that declares the law of gravity to be null and void.

It is passed by Congress, signed with a flourish by the President, and entered into the Federal Register with great fanfare.

The sponsors of this bill hold a press conference on the White House lawn. They declare victory for the American taxpayer, for personal freedom, and for the rights of heavy objects everywhere to be unshackled from the invisible chains of physics.

They claim it will cause the price of shipping to come tumbling down, and that it is a necessary correction to a “gravitational scam” that has for too long kept things rooted to the ground.

Now, the next morning, a man in his workshop drops a hammer on his foot.

Does he pause, rub his toe, and say, “Well, I suppose that was my own fault for not waiting for the paperwork to clear the Office of Management and Budget”?

He does not. He howls in pain, because the hammer is still governed by a reality far more stubborn than any government order.

This is the proper lens through which to view the recent action by President Donald Trump and his EPA administrator to repeal the so-called “endangerment finding.”

They have, proving Einstein’s theory of infinite stupidity, declared that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses are no longer a danger to public health and welfare.

They have taken a pen to a scientific fact, hoping to cross it out as if it were a typo. And in doing so, they have presented the nation with a spectacle: a piece of theater masquerading as governance, a sideshow of the highest order.

The premise is that if you simply remove the legal label “pollutant” from the thing coming out of the tailpipe, the thing itself changes.

This is an act of magical thinking, a belief that a proclamation from Washington can rewrite the composition of the atmosphere.

They tell us that the 1.6 million gallons of gasoline burned every single hour in this country are now, by fiat, harmless. The logic would be farcical if the stakes were not so terrifyingly real.

While the Republicans are busy arguing in court about the precise definition of “welfare” in a fifty-year-old piece of legislation, the oceans are still warming.

The same oceans are still rising, swallowing coastlines in slow motion.

The atmosphere is still holding more water vapor, whipping our storms into a more furious frenzy. The West is still burning. The crops are still failing. The glaciers are still retreating.

These things do not care about the Clean Air Act. They do not care about the fine print in a regulatory filing.

They are happening. They are the hammer dropping, indifferent to the political theater unfolding in its path.

This entire exercise is a gift to the fossil fuel industry, a reward for decades of campaign contributions and strategic lawyering.

It is the culmination of a project that began in smoke-filled rooms, where industry lobbyists plotted to create a fog of uncertainty around a clear and present danger.

The administration has adopted their talking points, their legal theories, and their studied obliviousness with the enthusiasm of a true believer.

They chant “drill, baby, drill” as if the Earth’s crust were an inexhaustible pantry, and they champion the burning of coal—that black relic of a bygone century—with a nostalgia that borders on the religious.

They promise that this will bring car prices “tumbling down.” Perhaps, for a moment, it will.

But the price of a car is a pittance compared to the price of a planet that is slowly, then suddenly, becoming incapable of sustaining the life we know.

The true cost of this policy will not be tallied in a Treasury Department spreadsheet. It will be tallied in flooded basements in Vermont, in failed harvests in the Midwest, in asthma inhalers used by children in the city, in the emergency room visits during heat waves that used to be called summer.

Here is the deep, rich irony that the architects of this sideshow have missed: in their zeal to “unshackle” industry from federal oversight, they may well be exposing it to a far more chaotic and unpredictable form of justice.

By arguing that the federal government has no power over carbon, they are also arguing that its power to shield industry from liability is void.

The Clean Air Act has been a shield, protecting oil companies from lawsuits seeking damages for the harms of climate change.

Remove that shield, and what do you have?

You have a flood of litigation to accompany the rising sea waters encroaching on America’s coastal cities.

You have California and a dozen other states setting their own rules, creating a patchwork of regulations that is the auto industry’s worst nightmare.

You have a legal landscape that is not a calm, deregulated pond, but a roiling sea of conflicting state laws and federal lawsuits.

The oil industry, for all its cunning, understands this. They asked the administration to tread carefully, to maybe just focus on cars.

They know that a world with no federal rules is not a world without rules; it is a world of chaos, and chaos is bad for business.

The administration, drunk on the applause of the ideological faithful, has plunged ahead anyway, breaking the very shield the industry spent decades erecting for itself.

So let us call this what it is: a magnificent piece of political performance art.

It is a decree that two plus two equals five, signed into law and celebrated by those who find the math inconvenient.

It is a declaration that the Earth is flat, delivered from a podium with the presidential seal.

It changes nothing about the actual shape of the world, but it wastes precious time and energy while we argue about the curvature of the horizon.

The repeal of the endangerment finding is not the end of climate regulation. It is the end of orderly, predictable, federal climate regulation.

It is an abdication of responsibility so profound that it invites the very chaos it purports to prevent.

It is a sideshow, a distraction from the main event, which is the ongoing, unrelenting physical transformation of our world.

While the political clowns are busy entertaining us with their legal contortions and their promises of cheap gas, the real work of the planet—the warming, the melting, the burning—continues unabated, waiting for the moment we finally decide to get serious and rejoin the universe of facts.