It's no surprise that the Trump regime's replacement for the Obama-era Clean Power Plan does not say anything about the threat of climate change, but at one point it did.
According to Bloomberg, every draft of the replacement plan included a section on climate change but the Trump White House removed all of it before it was released to the public.
Drafts had devoted more than 500 words to highlighting the impacts -- more heat waves, intense hurricanes, heavy rainfalls, floods and water pollution -- as part of the proposal to replace Obama-era restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions. That language was left out of the Trump administration’s final analysis of the Environmental Protection Agency proposal, when it was unveiled Aug. 21.
Among the abandoned assertions: an acknowledgment that “the climate has continued to change, with new records being set” for global average surface temperatures, Arctic sea ice retreat, carbon dioxide concentrations and sea level rise, all markers of the phenomenon.
The White House also reportedly removed a section that said green house gases are a threat to future generations.
The fact is the federal government -- even the Republican-controlled federal government -- is in possession of information confirming that climate change is real and is a threat to life and property, but the executive branch is withholding that information and lying to the public about it.
The most obvious comparison that immediately occurs to me is tobacco companies who knew their addictive products cause cancer and withheld it from the public, except this is infinitely worse.
I've often said the climate change bailout of 2050 will be epic, but so will the lawsuits. I can scarcely begin to imagine the legal liability that climate change denial will expose the government to. And it won't be just citizens who demand their day in court. Insurance giants and other multinational corporations will be asking why the government denied knowledge of a direct threat to their entire business.