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LAST UPDATE | 6 Aug
THOSE WHOM THE gods would destroy, first they make mad. An eight-decade streak as the world’s undisputed scientific and economic powerhouse, spreading its influence and values around the globe through trade and the ‘soft’ power of popular culture, has come to an end. The United States is now in terminal decline.
Historians will decide whether the lawless felon Donald Trump was the primary cause of its downfall, or more a symptom of a country that had already rotted from within.
Consider this remark, made in 2004 by Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s senior adviser, when berating a reporter for being part of what he disparagingly called the “reality-based community “, Rove added: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality”.
The illusion of bending reality in pursuit of political, economic or ideological aims can only be maintained for a while. The real world, specifically the laws of nature, is not nearly so pliable. A century and a half ago, President Abraham Lincoln said that while the US was impervious to outside assault, “if destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher”.
The US, in other words, would eventually self-destruct, and so it has come to pass. While there are any number of examples of its ever quickening death spiral, to me, it’s perhaps best illustrated by the announcement in recent days that its Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is to scrap a landmark 2009 “endangerment finding”, upon which the agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gases depends.
Over the last 16 years, the EPA has brought the regulation of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane under the Clean Air Act, and in the decade and a half since it was enacted, the US has made significant strides to limit carbon emissions by, for example, setting limits on tailpipe emissions in cars.
Though still enormous, carbon emissions from the US have fallen steadily over the last decade and a half as a direct result of these regulations.
The Clean Air Act is as old as the EPA itself, having been enacted in 1970 by a Republican president, Richard Nixon, in response to widespread public alarm at the air and water pollution crisis in the US. It’s also a reminder that basic environmental protection used to be a bipartisan issue, with politicians on both sides of the aisle agreeing on the need to limit the dangerous consequences of environmental pollution.
In late July, the US Department of Energy published what it titled ‘A critical review of impacts of greenhouse gas emissions on the US climate’. Its five co-authors were hand-picked as noted climate deniers, operating at the very fringes of the scientific community and representing, at best, the views of fewer than 1% of practising climate scientists.
The 150-page report has not been subject to the normal process of scientific peer review, where anonymous expert reviewers carefully critique a document and check all its source material prior to its publication, to ensure its accuracy and that it fairly represents mainstream science.
The reason, of course, that this didn’t occur is that this report is instead a shabby political hit job on climate science. As Andrew Dessler, climate researcher at Texas A&M University, remarked: “The only way to get this report was to pick these authors”. The extensive cherry-picking and misrepresentation in the report “can rise to the level of scientific misconduct”, he added.
Another top US climate scientist, Prof Michael Mann of Penn State University, remarked that the energy department report was what you might expect “if you took a chatbot, and you trained it on the top 10 fossil fuel industry-funded climate denier websites”.
In the two-year election cycle culminating in Trump winning a second term in November 2024, fossil fuel giants pumped an astonishing $445 million into buying influence in the White House and in Congress.
They have succeeded beyond even their wildest imaginings, helped in no small measure by the pea-brained president’s own wilful ignorance and lack of even a rudimentary understanding of science.
The Trump-appointed EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, without a hint of irony, described repeal of the endangerment finding as “the largest deregulatory action in the history of America”, saying the finding was the “holy grail of the climate change religion”. However, as recently as 2016, Zeldin urged Congress to “reduce our reliance on fossil fuels”, adding that the US needed to pursue green energy sources and be better stewards of the environment.
His abandonment of his own principles in pursuit of political advancement as part of the MAGA cult is mirrored right across the US. In the 1990s, noted scientist and science communicator, Carl Sagan, presciently warned of the dangers that lay ahead for America when he wrote: “We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. This combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces”.
And Sagan could have been describing 2025 when he warned that: “Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back”.
Were he still alive, Sagan could scarcely have believed just how quickly it had all fallen apart. While the once mighty NASA is being gutted, with thousands of specialist staff fired and 24% budget cuts in 2025, its new interim administrator, Sean Duffy, is a former Fox News presenter, reality TV star and lumberjack. This may go some way towards explaining the literal lunacy of NASA’s newly announced plans to build a nuclear reactor on the moon by 2030.
The descent of the US into totalitarianism and its ideological assault on science is beginning to mirror the Soviet Union under Stalin, who imprisoned and murdered many political opponents while also waging a war on science that did not fit with Soviet ideology. Stalin promoted biologist Trofim Lysenko, while purging and imprisoning scientists who spoke up against his pseudoscience.
Lysenko’s bogus agricultural research triggered famines that led directly to millions of deaths in the Soviet Union, and was also a crucial part of the reason it fell so far behind the West in terms of scientific and technological progress.
In late July, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued an historic unanimous ruling on the legal obligation of all states to limit global warming to 1.5ºC. Failure to act in accordance with the science has been identified as a breach of international law. This ICJ ruling underlines how the US is increasingly isolated and at odds with the global community.
Once the undisputed world leader, a self-described shining city on the hill, America’s slide into obscurantism tragically comes at the very moment that strong, coordinated and rules-based multilateral action to stabilise the climate system and avert global catastrophe has never been more desperately needed.
John Gibbons is a journalist and author of ‘The Lie Of The Land – A Game Plan for Ireland in the Climate Crisis’. It is published by Penguin, released this September.
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