It’s Everyone’s Environment, Stupid

Denying your denial. Fifty plus years of indisputable science and we’re moving backwards at enormous cost.

Back when I was in the wine business in the early 2000s, we added a Sauvignon Blanc to our portfolio mostly so we’d have a white wine to pour at warm daytime tastings. We frequently played around with our back label text and featured the above lines on the new release.

Yep, we paired our new wine with climate change. A friend in the wine business from a family renowned for their climate activism read it and said, “Wow, you actually made a climate change joke on your wine bottle.” Gallows humor has always been my primary way to cope when things are at their heaviest so why not with existential climate dread?

That was way back in 2008 and here we are in 2025 having to withstand this idiotic administration attempting to undo even the concept of climate change as the west burns and everywhere else floods. This isn’t a culture war opinion battle, this is a hard truth that we all are feeling the increasing effects of year upon year. Yet Bernie, just the other day, felt compelled to publish a statement titled, No, Mr. President. Climate Change is Not a Hoax and the NYT just published an article titled, Trump Is Gutting Weather Science and Reducing Disaster Response. And here I am feeling compelled to write about it when I could be writing about the Epstein files.

What the fuck are we doing with our collective future? When I talk about common sense common good, this one is right up at the top of the list. For all of us and especially for future generations who we might want to start caring about before it’s too late. Yet another huge reason why young people don’t trust either side right now. Because remember, even Democrats are pro-fracking now to try and fail to win Pennsylvania and Biden-Harris hit all time highs for domestic oil and gas production because voters were angry about high gas prices.

Is nothing at all above political strategizing? No need to answer that question of course.

As long as there has been climate change knowledge, there has been climate change denial by those in the fossil fuel industry and the politicians they own. The Guardian published an article in 2019 called, Half A Century of Dither And Denial – A Climate Crisis Timeline with this sentence in subtitle position: Fossil fuel companies have been fully aware of their impact on the planet since at least the 1950s.

Here are a few lowlights with a couple notable positives that were then ignored:

In 1965, Lydon Johnson’s President’s Science Advisory Committee stated that “pollutants have altered on a global scale the carbon dioxide content of the air”, with effects that “could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings”. Summarizing the findings, the head of the American Petroleum Institute (API) warned the industry: “Time is running out.” My note: If only we had listened to the head of the American Petroleum Institute. First and only time I ever thought or wrote that by the way.

In 1981, an internal Exxon memo warned “it is distinctly possible” that CO2 emissions from the company’s 50-year plan “will later produce effects which will indeed be catastrophic (at least for a substantial fraction of the Earth’s population)”. My note: You are correct, Exxon memo. Repeat thought from above.

In 1988 during the US presidential campaign, George Herbert Walker Bush said: “Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect forget about the White House effect … As president, I intend to do something about it.” My note: You know what they say about the road to hell being paved with good intentions but still, that acknowledgement would be rather refreshing from a modern day Republican.

Also in 1988, a confidential report prepared for Shell’s environmental conservation committee found CO2 could raise temperatures by 1C to 2C over the next 40 years with changes that may be “the greatest in recorded history”. It urged rapid action by the energy industry. “By the time the global warming becomes detectable it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even stabilize the situation,” it stated. My note: I can hear Trump saying “Greatest in recorded history” like it was a good thing.

In 1989, US industry groups established the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), a lobbying group to challenge the science on global warming and delay action to reduce emissions. Exxon, Shell and BP join between 1993-94. My note: So a coalition of evil to seal our collective fate. Y’all couldn’t think of any better coalitions to form? Or it should have at least had a more sinister name like Global Climate Crushing Cabal.

In 1992, at the Rio Earth summit, countries signed up to the world’s first international agreement to stabilize greenhouse gases and prevent dangerous manmade interference with the climate system. This established the UN framework convention on climate change. President Bush says: “The US fully intends to be the pre-eminent world leader in protecting the global environment.” My note: Could we bring back the Bush family? So many first and last time statements for me in this section.

Fast forwarding to 2009, US senator Jim Inhofe, whose main donors were from the oil and gas industry, led the “Climategate” misinformation attack on scientists on the opening day of the crucial UN climate conference in Copenhagen. My note: Inhofe is dead or I would try to hold him accountable for not caring about the rest of us. I hope it was death by starving polar bear. Told you I liked gallows humor.

In 2017, Exxon, Chevron and BP each donate at least $500,000 for the inauguration of Donald Trump as president. My note: Their collective spending hasn’t slowed down since by the way, nearly half a billion in donations, lobbying and advertising in getting him and his lackeys elected a second time according to The Guardian. That doesn’t include dark money by the way and this money couldn’t be any darker.

Which more or less brings us up to now with climate change denier Lee Zeldin as head of the EPA. His EPA has recently put forth a proposed rule stating that power plants—the nation’s largest stationary source of carbon emissions, responsible for a quarter of US heat-trapping emissions and on their own the 6th largest emitter globally—do not “contribute significantly” to climate change and thus do not merit regulation by EPA. I do not think “significantly” means what he thinks it means. He has also initiated a challenge to the 2009 endangerment finding by the agency that had the oh-so-controversial finding that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health. He is also known for sticking his head in the sand when at the beach.

Under Zeldin, the agency intended to protect us has halted all environmental justice initiatives and research, curtailed pollution enforcement and has been accused of retaliating against employees voicing dissent with suspensions and firings.

It’s the Environmental Pillage Agency for the next 3.5 years. As extreme weather events become more frequent and intense. Multiple readers of this newsletter have lost their homes to fire, we have family who were affected by the flooding in North Carolina in 2024 and all of our hearts broke with the recent devastating flooding and loss of life in Texas.

In the aftermath of that disaster you may have read that Texas lawmakers came close to introducing a statewide initiative to improve emergency alerts just a few months ago. The bill, HB 13, would have set up a network of outdoor sirens but the plan was killed in the state senate with members griping about its cost.

A few snippets from a recent article in The Guardian:

To Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, this repeating cycle of environmental disaster followed by scant preparation for future events is not coincidental. “Texas will spend a lot of money recovering from disasters, but they’ll spend very little trying to avoid the next disaster,” he said.

This moment begs for a political culture that can confront the challenge head on, experts say. But that is not the prevailing mood in Texas.

Dessler, who specializes in climate change, traces the source of the resistance to the fossil fuel industry, which with its mega-donations to Republican politicians wields a big stick. “It’s the political power of fossil fuels, and their ability to keep everybody in line.”

The official platform of the Texas Republican party is explicit. It proposes the abolition of the federal Environmental Protection Agency, supports the reclassification of carbon dioxide as a “non-pollutant”, and opposes what it calls “environmentalism, or ‘climate change’ initiatives that obstruct legitimate business interests and private property use”.

Abbott and other top state Republicans are openly skeptical of climate crisis science. In 2022, when Dallas was hit by colossal floods, reporters tried and failed to get the governor even to utter the words “climate change”.

But instead of doing anything about preventing any of it, we deny reality and cut monitoring, mitigation efforts and emergency response in the name of performative budgetary concern. My own county is set to lose $37 million with the cancellation of the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program that helped states protect against potential disaster damage. Neighboring counties will also lose similar amounts. The only thing that has stopped my government attorney wife from banging her head against her desk is a lawsuit filed this week by 20 attorneys general against the Trump administration to restore the BRIC grant program. Hope that doesn’t make it to the Supreme Court anytime soon.

So let’s say you have a roof with a giant hole in it. Do you focus your efforts on cleaning up each time it rains into your house or do you get a ladder, climb up to analyze the problem and then fix the damn roof? It might even be reasonable to focus on the future savings from not continuing to deal with further water damage even if money is tight.

According to a new study by World Resources Institute that analyzed 320 adaptation and resilience investments across 12 countries totaling $133 billion, every $1 invested in adaptation and resilience generates more than $10 in benefits over 10 years. Sounds like we should be doing a lot more of that but instead we have an administration dedicated to the exact opposite and an opposition party that abandoned any mention of planetary stewardship while losing to a cruel, knowledge-free, fully transactional narcissist again.

Analysis of the Democrats failure in 2024 always focused on the economy, stupid but what if we also look at the environment, stupid? Which in this case means both parties were willfully stupid about running away from the importance of environmental protection. It was one of the major reasons behind so many young people jumping off the Democratic Party bandwagon. Anyone else remember the rise and fall of the Green Party as a political force? Or the Green New Deal as a priority? At least the Sunrise Movement still cares.

In one April 2025 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), scientists surveyed nearly 3,000 young people in the U.S. aged 16-to-24 and found that a staggering 75% of those polled said that they think the future is frightening and 83% said that they believe the adults in charge have failed to take care of the planet. That 17% who don’t think that must be related to Lee Zeldin or refused to answer because they found the question so stupid. Approximately 20% of those polled stated that they were afraid to have children—worrying about bringing a new generation into our increasingly uncomfortable world. That figure jumped to over 30% among young people who had experienced a severe-weather event first hand.

So as the MAGA authoritarian movement tries to incentivize having more babies they simultaneously scare young people from wanting to bring children into this imploding world we have created and will be making substantially worse for at least 3.5 more years. Which brings us ever closer to the projected tipping point of 2032 when the average global temperature is expected to have risen another 1.5 degrees Celsius from current all-time highs with all kinds of even more catastrophic consequences. I dare anyone that does not put environmental protection spending high on their list of priorities to read this whole article from Responsible Science Journal titled The Point Of No Return: How Close Is The World To Irreversible Climate Change. Quick math calculation: 3.5 more years of denial and backsliding gets us to 3.5 years left to act before next level dire consequences. Uh oh.

Excuse me while I go play tackle football with an old school leather helmet while chain-smoking cigarettes. Ah, the good old days when we didn’t know shit from shinola. And now that we do, we’ll just continue pretending that we don’t.

Someone start chilling the Sauvignon Blanc, please.

PS — I do not believe the history books will be calling Trump “the fertilization president” for just about every reason one can imagine.

PPS - Turns out “Abolish ICE” was perhaps not quite strong enough language. Another rant coming soon.