Tell the people what the people want to hear, such is Trump’s contribution to contemporary politics. Americans believe him because they want to believe him. On the contrary, trying to combat the climate crisis implies changes and even sacrifices.
This is how Manuel Vicent concluded his last Sunday column in The Country: “Scientists had warned well in advance of the tragedy that was coming around Valencia and they were not wrong (…). With many tears the dead will be buried, with time this tragedy of Valencia will be forgotten, and for our part we will continue playing to challenge nature, as always, without having learned anything.”
I share the sad prediction of the wise writer: in Valencia, throughout Spain, we will continue building brick beehives in boulevards, valleys, streams and other flood-prone areas, we will continue cramming parked cars on both sides of streets as narrow as those of a Moroccan medina, We will continue to travel everywhere in oil-thirsty vehicles all the time. And, of course, we will continue to vote for politicians who do not propose sacrifices in our way of life to combat the greatest material threat that weighs on the future of humanity today: the climate emergency.
I use the first person plural to follow Vicent, but neither he nor I are referring to each and every one of us, we are referring to the majority of people, perhaps the vast majority. That in the United States has just voted in favor of a Donald Trump who denies the existence of climate change and, in his first speech after victory, made explicit praise of the United States oil industry, the liquid gold of a nation that , as he prophesied, will be great again under his second presidency. That Trump who, in that speech, had admiring words for the “supergenius” Elon Musk for having provided the best solution for the hurricane that devastated North Carolina: his Starlink communications system. “He saved a lot of lives,” Trump said.
Trump is a denier and the first thing he did when he won the White House for the first time was to withdraw the United States from the timid Paris Agreement against climate change. Trump does not believe that human action has anything to do with the fact that there are now so many terrible droughts followed by so many superlative floods. He thinks that such phenomena have always existed and finds nothing strange in the fact that they are now more frequent and intense. Everything related to the decarbonization of the planet and the use of clean and renewable energy seems to him to be nonsense from the eternal enemies of humanity, that riffraff that his Argentine disciple Milei contemptuously calls “the lefties.”
It turns out that the polls have proven for the second time that the majority of Americans believe Trump. They believe in him as one believes in a religion, with a faith that reason and science cannot break. And why do they believe him? Because they want to believe him. Because the opposite, trying not to continue damaging the planet, implies changes and even sacrifices. Like what a junkie has to do to get out of his drug addiction. Stop consuming dirty energies. Stop deforesting the planet. Stop building anywhere. Stop seeing everything in life as a business opportunity. Stop worshiping money.
It rains mud upon mud. When minutes of silence are observed throughout Europe for the tremendous human and material damage caused by the flood in Valencia, Trump’s victory is disastrous news for Mother Earth. The second most polluting nation in the world – China is the first – is going to continue producing smoke and garbage in colossal quantities. And Trump’s political epigones, the extreme right of the Milei, Bolsonaro, Ayuso, Abascal and company, see their path to absolute power ratified in the American polls: municipal, regional, national, judicial, economic and media.
As simple as it is, this formula is even simplistic. Namely, nationalism –USA, USA, USA!Trump supporters chanted tribally after the victory, hatred of dark-skinned immigrants, cultivation of hoaxes – there are no longer truths and lies, damn it -, messianism – “God saved my life to heal the United States”, Trump dixit– and climate denialism. Such is the electorally winning recipe in the West.
Telling the people what the people want to hear is Trump’s great contribution to contemporary politics. Alert people in the middle of the school and work day? Change your car for a less polluting one? Put solar panels? Prohibit construction on boulevards, valleys and streams? Create floodable natural spaces? Wow, what a laziness, that’s all bullshit. Pedro Sánchez, the blacks and the Moors are to blame for the flood. You vote for the ultras and maybe one day you will get rich like Elon Musk and you can buy a little plot on the planet Mars for when the Earth is unlivable.
#Climate #change #Quia #lefthanded #nonsense
