Well, it's official. Last week, Donald J. Trump accepted the Republican nomination for President of the United States, and he did it with a long, carefully scripted speech that stuck to the twin themes of his campaign: fear and loathing. Those topics, you can be sure, were covered thoroughly and enthusiastically.
What Trump left out of his speech, though, was typical of him. Although he wants us to believe that our country is in horrible shape, he has nothing to offer by way of concrete proposals for solving these alleged problems beyond "trust me." And oddly enough, despite Trump's pathological aversion to truth-telling, I do trust him. I trust he would turn our government over to billionaire polluters. I trust he would cripple, if not destroy, the Environmental Protection Agency. I trust he would sell off our public lands and destroy our Arctic and coastlines. And perhaps most of all, I trust he would do everything in his power to make our nation an international climate pariah.
In a speech drenched in fear-mongering, Trump never once mentioned what has the potential to be one of the scariest crises in human history: climate disruption. But why should he? He rejects the science of climate change, which if he should win the election, would put him in a category of one. That's right, President Donald Trump would be the only world leader on the planet who doesn't believe that climate change is real. That sounds incredible, right? But the Sierra Club checked, and the Trump Climate Singularity is for real. Every leader in the world takes climate change seriously -- even the authoritarian types like Russia's Vladimir Putin and North Korea's Kim Jung Un that Trump can't stop praising. In this one respect -- climate denial -- the Republican nominee truly is as extraordinary an individual as he claims.
Trump says he would pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement and cancel the Clean Power Plan. Based on his understanding of climate and energy issues, I don't doubt he'd try. We can't afford to see how far he might get.
Paid for by Sierra Club Political Committee, www.sierraclub.org, and not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.