Michael Moore predicts that historians will mark the Trump administration as the beginning of the end of human life on earth in a foreboding Facebook post.
Documentary film-maker and political activist Michael Moore posted a chilling prediction on his Facebook profile last week in the week of Trump’s “executive orders ending all efforts to stop and reverse climate change.”
Moore began his post with the ominous warning that “Historians in the near future (because that may be the only future we have) will mark today, March 28, 2017, as the day the extinction of human life on earth began.”
Continuing, he explains that Trump “is rescinding President Obama’s six climate change orders. He is instructing the Environmental Protection Agency to cease its climate change efforts and do no environmental regulations that get in the way of profits or ‘jobs.’ The EPA is to only concern itself with ‘clean air and clean water’ – while Trump orders a massive increase in the use of coal.”
“This is a defining moment in the history of mankind. By signing these executive orders today, Trump is declaring an act of war on the planet and its inhabitants,” Moore adds before giving the planet a glimmer of hope:
“The one silver lining here is that Trump can’t kill the planet; the planet wants to live and has a long history of wiping out any real or perceived threats. With the actions Trump is taking today, the planet is paying attention — and the planet will make sure it dispenses with a species hell-bent on destroying Earth.”
Unfortunately, Moore’s prediction may not be too far from the literal truth.
Conservative website Forbes blasted the proposed repeal of the Clean Power Plan (CPP), just one of those six Obama administration climate change orders that Trump has rescinded.
Noting that “new analysis shows that repealing the rule would cost the U.S. economy hundreds of billions of dollars [and] add more than a billion tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere,” Forbes make their own dire prediction that the repeal of the CPP would “cause more than 100,000 premature deaths due to inhaled particulate pollution.”
The article was authored Jeffrey Rissman, the Head of Modeling & Energy Policy for Energy Innovation, an energy and environmental policy firm that delivers high-quality research and original analysis to policymakers to help them make informed choices on energy policy.
As Rissman explains,
Energy Innovation utilized the Energy Policy Simulator (EPS) to analyze the effects of repealing the CPP. The EPS is an open-source computer model developed to estimate the economic and emissions effects of various combinations of energy and environmental policies using non-partisan, published data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), U.S. EPA, Argonne National Laboratory, U.S. Forest Service, and U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics, among others. The EPS has been peer reviewed by experts at MIT, Stanford University, Argonne National Laboratory, Berkeley National Laboratory and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.
That analysis yielded the following grim results regarding human mortality:
- “Repealing the CPP would result in an increase of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) emissions of more than 500 million metric tons (MMT) in 2030 and 1200 MMT in 2050, contributing to global warming and severe weather events, such as hurricanes, floods and droughts.”
- “Although the CPP’s focus is on reducing carbon emissions, the same policies also reduce particulate pollution, which is responsible for thousands of heart attacks and respiratory diseases each year. Repealing the CPP would increase particulate emissions, causing more than 40,000 premature deaths in 2030 and more than 120,000 premature deaths in 2050.” [emphasis added]
Rissman’s simulator also produced the following economic predictions:
- “Cumulative net costs to the U.S. economy (in increased capital, fuel, and operations and maintenance (O&M) expenditures) would exceed $100 billion by 2030 and would reach nearly $600 billion by 2050.”
- “Without the CPP, the U.S. electric grid would feature a larger capacity of coal power plants, while the capacity of wind and solar on the system would be smaller.” Furthermore, “This slow-down in the transition to clean energy would cost the U.S. technological leadership in the rapidly-growing solar and wind industries and would cost the U.S. many jobs. Even today, when wind makes up 6.6 percent and solar 1.8 percent of total U.S. installed capacity, the solar industry employs 374,000 people and wind industry 101,000 workers, roughly two and a half times the 187,000 combined workers in the coal, natural gas and oil industries.”
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