Chomsky on U.S. President’s Climate Change Denial
The celebrated linguist and media critic watches the world approaching a U.S. election whose outcome he believes could send the planet hurtling further towards environmental catastrophe.
It is perhaps not surprising he has stark words about Donald Trump and the Republican Party, which he says is the world’s only large conservative political grouping to deny the existence of climate change.
In an interview with The Independent to promote a new book about the urgency of the crisis and a means to transition to a non-fossil fuel economy as part of a so-called global green new deal, he says he has identified several patterns over the course of the Trump presidency.
One is to tear up any deals in which he played no part in creating, such as the 2015 Paris Accord to try and limit the planet’s warning, which Barack Obama helped to broker, and from which Trump has withdrawn the United States.
"He didn’t create it, destroy it, OK,” he says.
Chomsky also makes a highly controversial comparison between Trump and Adolf Hitler.
The public intellectual and activist, whose many celebrated works include Manufacturing Consent, is now aged 91. He is adamant the threat represented by the heating planet is unprecedented.
"The facts are pretty straight; there is almost universal consensus among serious scientists that we are racing towards the cataclysm, if current tendencies persist,” he says.
"By the end of this century, you might have reached the level three, maybe four degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. And every analysis concludes that’s a total cataclysm. Organized human societies – nothing survives.”
He adds: "We are moving towards cataclysm. There is one country in the world, the United States, which wants to put its foot on the accelerator.”
Asked about the specific role played by the president, and the Republican Party, he says the global coronavirus pandemic, which has so far killed more than 1 million people and infected more than 43 million, can be tackled, but not with "malignant cancer in charge of the policies - someone who moves to destroy anything that doesn’t improve his electoral chances”.
"Definitely the worst one I can think of in history, Adolf Hitler was pretty hideous – [but] he wasn’t trying to destroy organized human society on earth,” he says.
Challenged on this, with the fact that the Nazi Holocaust killed Jewish people, Chomsky, whose parents were Jewish, says Hitler also killed "30 million Slavs, but not human civilization”.
Asked directly if he was saying Trump, 73, was worse than Hitler, Chomsky says: "That’s a very outrageous statement. And every time I say it, I preface it by saying, here’s an outrageous statement, but please ask yourself whether it’s true.”
Chomsky, whose book with progressive economist Robert Pollin is entitled Climate Cris and the Global Green New Deal, cites the Wannsee Conference,
held in a Berlin suburb in January 1942 to lay out the Nazis’ plan for the extermination of the Jewish people – what they termed the final solution.
He contrasts that dark genocidal moment in history with a 2018 statement by the Republicans’ National Highway Safety Administration which concluded no new restrictions were needed for vehicle emissions because it assessed global temperatures would rise by four percent by the end of the century.
As such, the Trump administration concluded there was little point in enforcing new emissions standards, given they were one of several contributors to global warming. The report’s authors wrote that stopping the required rise in greenhouse gas emissions "would require the economy and the [U.S.’s] vehicle fleet to substantially move away from the use of fossil fuels, which is not currently technologically feasible or economically practicable”.
"[They’re saying] so we’re heading for cataclysm, let’s go faster because that’ll mean more profits for my constituency, the researchers who fund me,” says Chomsky. "Can you think of a document like that in history.”
He adds: "OK, so let’s go back to the outrageous statement. Well, it’s outrageous. It’s not false.”
The president has repeatedly dismissed the climate crisis and spent much of his term overturning environmental standards imposed by Barack Obama. He also withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 Paris Accord.
This autumn, as wildfires ravaged much of the U.S. West with a scale and intensity not seen for a century, the president sought to blame bad forest management.
In September, Trump visited California and spoke with government officials. One of them Wade Crowfoot, California’s secretary for natural resources, said to the president: "If we ignore that science and sort of put our head in the sand and think it’s all about vegetation management, we’re not going to succeed together protecting Californians.” Trump replied: "It’ll start getting cooler. You just watch.”
By contrast, a 2018 assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned policy makers of the necessity of seeking to limit warming to 1.5C to avoid even more catastrophe. One of its authors wrote: "Every extra bit of warming matters, especially since warming of 1.5C or higher increases the risk associated with long-lasting or irreversible changes, such as the loss of some ecosystems.”
It is perhaps not surprising he has stark words about Donald Trump and the Republican Party, which he says is the world’s only large conservative political grouping to deny the existence of climate change.
In an interview with The Independent to promote a new book about the urgency of the crisis and a means to transition to a non-fossil fuel economy as part of a so-called global green new deal, he says he has identified several patterns over the course of the Trump presidency.
One is to tear up any deals in which he played no part in creating, such as the 2015 Paris Accord to try and limit the planet’s warning, which Barack Obama helped to broker, and from which Trump has withdrawn the United States.
"He didn’t create it, destroy it, OK,” he says.
Chomsky also makes a highly controversial comparison between Trump and Adolf Hitler.
The public intellectual and activist, whose many celebrated works include Manufacturing Consent, is now aged 91. He is adamant the threat represented by the heating planet is unprecedented.
"The facts are pretty straight; there is almost universal consensus among serious scientists that we are racing towards the cataclysm, if current tendencies persist,” he says.
"By the end of this century, you might have reached the level three, maybe four degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. And every analysis concludes that’s a total cataclysm. Organized human societies – nothing survives.”
He adds: "We are moving towards cataclysm. There is one country in the world, the United States, which wants to put its foot on the accelerator.”
Asked about the specific role played by the president, and the Republican Party, he says the global coronavirus pandemic, which has so far killed more than 1 million people and infected more than 43 million, can be tackled, but not with "malignant cancer in charge of the policies - someone who moves to destroy anything that doesn’t improve his electoral chances”.
"Definitely the worst one I can think of in history, Adolf Hitler was pretty hideous – [but] he wasn’t trying to destroy organized human society on earth,” he says.
Challenged on this, with the fact that the Nazi Holocaust killed Jewish people, Chomsky, whose parents were Jewish, says Hitler also killed "30 million Slavs, but not human civilization”.
Asked directly if he was saying Trump, 73, was worse than Hitler, Chomsky says: "That’s a very outrageous statement. And every time I say it, I preface it by saying, here’s an outrageous statement, but please ask yourself whether it’s true.”
Chomsky, whose book with progressive economist Robert Pollin is entitled Climate Cris and the Global Green New Deal, cites the Wannsee Conference,
held in a Berlin suburb in January 1942 to lay out the Nazis’ plan for the extermination of the Jewish people – what they termed the final solution.
He contrasts that dark genocidal moment in history with a 2018 statement by the Republicans’ National Highway Safety Administration which concluded no new restrictions were needed for vehicle emissions because it assessed global temperatures would rise by four percent by the end of the century.
As such, the Trump administration concluded there was little point in enforcing new emissions standards, given they were one of several contributors to global warming. The report’s authors wrote that stopping the required rise in greenhouse gas emissions "would require the economy and the [U.S.’s] vehicle fleet to substantially move away from the use of fossil fuels, which is not currently technologically feasible or economically practicable”.
"[They’re saying] so we’re heading for cataclysm, let’s go faster because that’ll mean more profits for my constituency, the researchers who fund me,” says Chomsky. "Can you think of a document like that in history.”
He adds: "OK, so let’s go back to the outrageous statement. Well, it’s outrageous. It’s not false.”
The president has repeatedly dismissed the climate crisis and spent much of his term overturning environmental standards imposed by Barack Obama. He also withdrew the U.S. from the 2015 Paris Accord.
This autumn, as wildfires ravaged much of the U.S. West with a scale and intensity not seen for a century, the president sought to blame bad forest management.
In September, Trump visited California and spoke with government officials. One of them Wade Crowfoot, California’s secretary for natural resources, said to the president: "If we ignore that science and sort of put our head in the sand and think it’s all about vegetation management, we’re not going to succeed together protecting Californians.” Trump replied: "It’ll start getting cooler. You just watch.”
By contrast, a 2018 assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned policy makers of the necessity of seeking to limit warming to 1.5C to avoid even more catastrophe. One of its authors wrote: "Every extra bit of warming matters, especially since warming of 1.5C or higher increases the risk associated with long-lasting or irreversible changes, such as the loss of some ecosystems.”
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