Trump’s quest for credibility...

This past Monday night, Donald Trump and Elon Musk had a long rant which I didn’t follow in its entirety as the event was plagued with technical problems. Trump, currently aimless and in desperate search for visibility had recently said he has ‘no choice’ but to back EVs after Musk endorsement, inferring that even though he didn’t like the idea, it was the polite way to say thank you. 

I must add that if Musk has some intellectual intelligence, Trump has almost none, as you’ll discover later on, and both sorely lack any emotional intelligence. Since most of the discussion wasn’t really newsworthy, I’d like to focus this piece on the Climate Crisis, an element amply covered at that event by Trump and Musk, the latter sinking to Donald’s low intellectual level and both agreeing that the world has plenty of time to move away from fossil fuels, if at all. 

Many times called a “hoax” by Trump, climate change was a new topic of discussion for the aging candidate who said it was “disgrace” that Joe Biden’s administration did not open up a vast Arctic wilderness in Alaska to oil drilling, claimed without basis that farmers are having to give up their cattle because of climate regulations and that a far greater threat is posed by the prospect of nuclear war. 

Among other stupidities, both made rambling assertions about climate change, including that there was no urgent need to cut carbon emissions, during an event that “dove down into new levels of stupidity”, according to Bill McKibben, a veteran climate activist and co-founder of 350.org. McKibben wrote it was “the dumbest climate conversation of all time”. “You sort of can’t get away from it at this moment,” Trump said of fossil fuels. “I think we have, you know, perhaps hundreds of years left. Nobody really knows.” 

The former US president added that rising sea levels, caused by melting glaciers, would have the benefit of creating “more oceanfront property”. Despite this Trump’s claims of new beaches (?) sea levels are rising faster along the US coastline than the global average, with up to 1ft of sea level rise expected in the next 30 years – an increase that equals the total rise seen over the past century, US government scientists have found. Trump’s reality goes totally against that fact as there will be far less “oceanfront” property as the realtor-turned-president thinks. 

Trump even tried to be subtle by adding: “The one thing that I don’t understand is that people talk about global warming or they talk about climate change, but they never talk about nuclear warming”. This comment made me roll my eyes and concluded that both need a long, well deserved vacation or an indefinite retreat from this word. Another total waste of time for the 193,000 folks including myself who followed these ramblings!