It’s getting hot in here.
A 500-page environmental statement by the Trump administration predicted that the planet will warm by seven degrees by 2100, the Washington Post reported.
Scientists said the effects would be catastrophic — flooding coastal cities like New York and Miami, causing irreparable harm to coral reefs and generating heat waves that would bake much of the planet, the report said.
The administration, in a draft statement issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, did not call for cutting greenhouse emissions to avoid the changes, but just the opposite.
The statement, written last month to justify freezing federal fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks manufactured after 2020 as proposed by the Obama administration, admitted the plan would increase vehicle emissions but said they’d only be a small addition to the environmental damage that’s already been done.
“The amazing thing they’re saying is human activities are going to lead to this rise of carbon dioxide that is disastrous for the environment and society. And then they’re saying they’re not going to do anything about it,” Michael MacCracken, who served as a senior scientist at the US Global Change Research Program between 1993 and 2002, told the newspaper.
To avoid that disastrous scenario, the world would have to make huge cuts in carbon emissions, the analysis said, requiring ” substantial increases in technology innovation and adoption compared to today’s levels and would require the economy and the vehicle fleet to move away from the use of fossil fuels, which is not currently technologically feasible or economically feasible.”
The Trump administration, which withdrew in June 2017 from the Paris climate agreement, did not respond to requests for comment from the Washington Post.