WE ARE TOLD, in the classic story of Oedipus, about the king who managed to bring devastation to his city and family, a king who, when he finally learned the truth of his crimes, blinded himself.
I thought of that epic tragedy when I read of one decision by our current ruler, one event amid all the dozens of others. And this one was less immediately tragic—it didn’t involve pulling an immigrant with a brain tumor out of a hospital for deportation, nor forcing transgender Americans to produce a birth certificate before they pee. No, this tragedy will play out over a longer time.
In early March (and, of course, late on a Friday afternoon), his new team at the Commerce Department announced that they intended to cut the climate satellite program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration by 22 percent. They proposed a lot of other terrible cuts the same day: virtually zeroing out the environmental justice programs at EPA and cutting the environmental education budget by 94 percent. But the one that future historians will, I think, obsess over is the satellites.
Consider: In the last few months, we’ve learned that 2016 set the all-time record for the hottest recorded year on planet earth. We’ve seen, over the last few years, the highest wind speeds ever recorded in one ocean basin after another, as record-hot water produces amped-up hurricanes. An iceberg a quarter the size of Wales (not a whale—Wales) is about to break off from the Larsen Ice Shelf in the Antarctic. And we’re going to blind ourselves? We’re going to start paying less attention?
In any rational world, we’d be launching satellites as fast as we could to try and get a handle on exactly what’s in store. And we’d be cutting carbon and methane as fast as we could to try and lessen the damage. Instead, at the same time, Trump’s EPA announced that the oil and gas industry would no longer have to even collect data about how much methane they were spewing into the atmosphere, and the news emerged that the administration was about to reduce targets for increased fuel efficiency for cars and trucks.
But in the world run by the fossil-fuel industry, knowing what’s coming at us must be avoided at all costs. They’ve been running a disinformation game for more than a quarter century now, investing huge sums in setting up “think tanks” to try and spread the falsehood that global warming is a matter of scientific debate. That effort is finally failing—somehow, each heatwave and drought makes it a little less credible. So now they’ve got to actually stop the flow of data. They’ve got to go pull the plug.
Think about that. Human ingenuity has allowed us to build satellites that can fly into space, with sensors that can look back at the earth in exquisite detail, offering us a clear warning about the danger ahead. And instead of celebrating that triumph, we’re now going to pretend it doesn’t exist. We’re going to blind ourselves—or, rather, our ruler is going to try to blind all of us.
You know what they say: The first time’s a tragedy and the second time’s an apocalypse.
Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, is the author most recently of The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at his Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened.
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