On his first day in office President Trump withdrew the US from the Paris climate accords, even though many heads of American corporations urged him not to do that. In Canada, on his first day as Prime Minister, Mark Carney axed the carbon tax as Pierre Polievre had been demanding.

Trump has actually gone farther than Carney, because he has also rolled back what McKibben referred to as “an incredible rollback of pretty much of all environmental regulation dating back to 1970.”

What makes McKibben particularly disappointed in America is that it is where so much of the important science warning us about climate change has come from, and now they are turning their backs on all of this knowledge and ignoring it. Another case of what I have been calling sacred ignorance.

As McKibben said,

“The U.S. was the place where we first understood what was happening. We were the first people to measure carbon in the atmosphere. The people that built the computer models that helped give us the warnings about what was coming. And those are precisely the programs that are now being chopped off. Even the programs where we measure the amount of carbon in the atmosphere or the temperature of the Earth are under assault, as if, by not measuring it, it might go away. But that’s not how physics works…. And willfully blinding ourselves to it is — has to rank high on the list of dumbest things that governments have ever done.”

That is an example of what I have called devotion to ignorance. Not the best approach.

But there might even be one thing they have done that is even dumber. That is ignoring the fact that it is already well understood that the cheapest power now on the planet is solar energy and America is ignoring that, unlike its chief world rival China. China now produces 2/3 of the world’s solar power while America is ramping up coal production! As McKibben said, “they’re going to own the future and we’re going to have some coal mines.” That’s why he says, “China will be eating our lunch.”

They don’t worship stupidity.