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ACCORDING TO LIZ - Not only by authorizing murderous actions here and abroad but with policy decisions leading to so many other unnecessary expenditures and needless fatalities?
In rocketing healthcare expenses and lives lost? In medical facilities overwhelmed and human bodies collapsing from escalating heatwaves? In women and children dying preventable deaths because Trump pulled international healthcare funding in order to cut taxes on billionaires and multinational profiteers?
In species vanished, in desertification, and massive wildfires? In coastal cities drowned by rising seas, in marine life destroyed by acidification?
Here and now.
A few days ago the Environmental Protection Agency has officially rejected overwhelming scientific consensus that greenhouse gases are an existential threat to human health and the environment.
That the agency can no longer regulate them.
Despite the majority of Americans including many Republican politicians, having accepted climate change threats as fact. A decision based on Trump dismissing it as a “hoax” responsible for impacting the profits of his deep-pocket donors and claiming, with absolutely no factual backup, that it would save auto manufacturers and other businesses an estimated $1 trillion.
Slamming the brakes on advances already made to slow global warming in its tracks.
Gutting the Obama-era government declaration known as the endangerment finding which determined that carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases were supercharging storms, wildfires, drought, heat waves and sea level rise.
Since it was a clear and present danger to public health and welfare, the federal government tasked the EPA to strenuously regulate these gases by curtailing the burning of oil, gas and coal.
It’s been the legal underpinning of nearly all climate regulations under the Clean Air Act since 2009, policing pollution emissions from motor vehicles, power plants and other man-made activities that are heating the planet. And killing off the biodiversity on which mankind relies for ultimate survival.
Increased temperatures are also skewing the male-female ratio in reptiles and some fish, the die-off of which may create fatal gaps in already-threatened ecological systems creating a waterfall effect of further die-offs.
Lee Zeldin, MAGA-mad EPA Administrator extraordinaire, perceived this as “the Holy Grail of federal regulatory overreach” augmenting on what Trump sneers at as “a scam.”
While the rest of the world went into mourning, Zeldin celebrated the announcement as “the single largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.”
Bush Junior’s “Heckuva job, Brownie” for the destruction and deaths caused by lack of enforced regulations and adequate preparedness in the wake of the Katrina devastation, now applies to almost all Trump appointees with their fingers in Trump’s deadly policies.
While Biden declared global warming a “clear and present danger” to the country in 2022 and Democrats toiled on the biggest climate law in American history, Trump administration veterans plotted to overturn their efforts as soon as Republicans regained control.
This despite a World Health Organization report published in the Lancet detailing that the rate of heat-related mortality has increased 23% since the 1990s, causing on average 546,000 deaths a year. Due to global warming, people were experiencing 16 additional days of dangerous heat by 2024, spiking risks for infants and the elderly.
Despite a 2021 study in Nature Climate Change across multiple countries that included 210 American counties determining that over one third of heat deaths were caused by human-generated climate change.
International numbers are almost all attributable to American policies. And its lack of global leadership to effectively and urgently address climate change.
That from 2010 to 2023 in Texas, 2.2% of summer deaths were from the more frequent and intense heat directly due to climate change.
That droughts, wildfires and heatwaves in 2023 caused moderate or severe food insecurity for an additional 124 million people.
That 640 billion hours of labor lost to unbearable heat caused over a trillion dollars of production losses, while the direct costs of heat-related deaths among older adults topped $261 billion.
That in 2022, the price of gas increased as much as 400% driving huge price increases in heating and electricity for consumers, slamming lower-income people the hardest. Causing evictions, suicides, and deaths on the street.
That global warming has brought intense periods of freezing weather with spiking deaths from exposure.
That an estimated 160,000 premature deaths every year from 2010 to 2022 were the result of coal-derived outdoor air pollution, a critical fact well-known for almost 200 years.
Explicit international subsidies for fossil fuels amounted to around $1.5 trillion in 2022, around 1.5% of the global GDP… or the entire GDP of Russia.
Indirect subsidies are closer to $7 trillion through support for industrialized agricultural, shipping, roadworks, transportation and pipeline accidents, payouts for pollution damages and related health impact increases, and other ancillary social costs.
Small now, but the escalation of murders by ICE and Border Control agents on the streets of American cities and in the for-profit concentration camps in which people targeted by skin color and language are incarcerated is deeply disturbing in a country once respected for its protection of peoples’ rights.
The incompetence and obdurateness of all the president’s henchmen is an existential threat all on its own.
The monomaniacal focus on crossings at the southern border framed as the war on drugs leading to multiple murders on the high seas just got more dangerous with the Pentagon testing of a laser.
Reportedly it zapped a party balloon, but the threats of its testing led to the precautionary shut down of everything in the El Paso airspace by the FAA, disrupting passenger service and commercial activities.
After all, what would have happened if that unproven laser lit up a Boeing 737 as it was landing?
To spread icing on his murderous cake of lies, Trump forced JD Vance to take down posts of the Vice President’s visit to a memorial in Armenia commemorating the Ottoman Empire’s systemic killing and deportation of mostly Christian Armenians in 1915, one of the 20th century’s worst genocides.
In the face of history and the memories of many thousands of Armenian Californians, this administration denies the Armenian genocide ever occurred.
M-mm, sounds like a set-up for making nicey-nice with Netanyahu over the Gazan genocide still being perpetrated by the Israelis.
Now the American war machine is poised for another unauthorized attack, on Iran, diverting attention away from Netanyahu’s ongoing misdeeds.
And does anyone think the 5,000-man military base now planned by the “Board of Peace” for Gaza won’t be another killing factory? At what cost to the American taxpayer above and beyond the $10 billion just promised by the Prez from the U.S. Treasury?
Then there are the deaths perpetrated by the Falsifier-in Chief’s attacks on elections. Sweeping lies about fraud and election officials’ malfeasance, court battles, and wholesale abuse of government power. And, when all else fails, exhorting mob violence.
The president of South Korea was just sentenced to life in prison for his insurrection; Prince Andrew just arrested for his dealings with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
There were deaths in DC on January 6th, there will be more money wasted – and more deaths – the more Trump loses.
Face and his mind...
(Liz Amsden is a former Angeleno now living in Vermont and a regular CityWatch contributor. She writes on issues she’s passionate about, including social justice, government accountability, and community empowerment. Liz brings a sharp, activist voice to her commentary and continues to engage with Los Angeles civic affairs from afar. She can be reached at [email protected].)
