Trump’s Motto: Your Money or Your Life
The
president claims you have to make a choice, but you don’t.
Opinion
Columnist
·
Sept. 22, 2020, 7:00 p.m. ET
Whenever I talk about Covid-19 or
climate change with skeptics, I use a simple analogy: Imagine that your child
is sick with a disease and you decide to take her to 100 different doctors to
get multiple opinions — and 99 doctors give you the same diagnosis and
prescribed treatment and one tells you that there’s nothing to worry about,
that your child’s disease will “disappear … like a miracle, it will disappear.”
What parents in their right minds would
follow the advice of the doctor with the one-out-of-100 diagnosis?
This, alas, is no hypothetical. This,
alas, is actually the most important question facing voters in choosing our
next president. Are you ready to trust your own child’s and the country’s health
to the guy who holds the one-out-of-100 view on both climate change and
Covid-19? He being Dr. Donald Trump, founder of Trump University, where he
apparently earned a B.S. in B.S.
It is stunning to me
how many conservatives want to go with the doctor with the one-out-of-100
diagnosis, since doing so is anything but conservative. It’s Trotskyite
radical.
And to riff off Trotsky for another
moment, Republicans may not be interested in Mother Nature, but Mother Nature
is interested in them. Both climate change and Covid-19 have brutally elbowed
their way into our lives in the past year, and for the same reason: We have
been stressing our ecosystems to their limits and beyond.
We’ve done this by invading wilderness
areas and extracting wildlife carrying viruses never borne before by human
beings and by emitting CO₂ that is heating the planet, amplifying storms that
brought four months of rain in four hours in Florida and wildfires of epic
proportions to the West Coast.
Joe Biden wants to
proceed with more caution, and Trump wants to throw caution to the wind. That’s
why the widely respected science journal Scientific American did something last
week for the first time, declaring: “Scientific American has never endorsed a
presidential candidate in our 175-year history — until now. The 2020 election
is literally a matter of life and death. We urge you to vote for health,
science and Joe Biden for President.”
The choice could not
be more stark or important. Trump’s implicit motto when it comes to Covid-19
and environmental protection is always the same: Your money OR your life?
Which do you value more? Biden’s motto
has been your money AND your life — you should not, and do not, have to choose
between them, if we are wise and follow science.
How so? On Covid-19, for Trump, it’s
jobs or masks, opening school or masks, social distancing or Big Ten football,
science or church. Everything is black or white. And so is the result: So many
Americans are jobless today and watching their kids learning remotely from home
because Trump pitted masks against in-classroom schooling, masks against jobs,
masks against indoor restaurant dining and masks against gathering for church
services.
And too many Americans chose jobs and
school and church out of desperation, and they’ve already paid the price or
will pay it.
Biden, by contrast, is a unifier. He’s
argued that if everyone wears a mask, practices social distancing and gets tested,
we can BOTH protect many more jobs AND protect many more lives. Masks are not
at war with jobs; they are the driver and protector of job growth in a
pandemic. Masks are the vehicle to opening schools and other indoor activities
— not their enemy. Just ask the Germans, Singaporeans or South Koreans.
Ditto when it comes to the environment
and climate change. Trump wants everyone to believe that protecting nature
means unemploying people. It’s clean air OR economic growth. It’s gas guzzlers
OR unemployment. He’s forever pitting jobs against nature.
Biden stands for the unity of jobs AND
the environment, the unity of jobs AND mitigating climate change. A clean,
green economy equals better health AND more and better jobs. And the beauty is
this: All that Biden has to do to prove his point is read aloud from the
business and science pages:
Oct. 15, New Scientist:
“The green economy has grown so much in the U.S. that it employs around 10
times as many people as the fossil fuel industry — despite the past decade’s
oil and gas boom.”
June 30, Bloomberg.com:
“Tesla Inc.’s market value has surpassed Exxon Mobil Corp.’s in a sign that
investors are increasingly betting on a global energy transition away from
fossil fuels.” Tesla makes electric cars, batteries and solar products.
Aug. 25, CBS News:
“Exxon Mobil, which joined the Dow Jones Industrial Average in 1928, is being
removed from the blue-chip stock market index. Its replacement: enterprise
software company Salesforce.com.”
April 6, Recharge:
“Renewables accounted for nearly three-quarters of global power capacity
additions last year — half of which was switched on in Asia, according to
latest figures from the International Renewable Energy Agency.”
Sept. 17, Fortune editor
Alan Murray: “Lululemon C.E.O. Calvin McDonald told me yesterday his company
now has more U.S. stores closed due to environmental risk — fires in the West,
hurricane in the Gulf, etc. — than due to Covid-19.”
If climate change turns out to be a
less serious problem than predicted, and we pursue all of the above anyway, we
will be like an athlete who trains for the Olympics, but the Olympics are
postponed. No problem. We’ll just be that much healthier. Our air will be
cleaner, our industries and vehicles and homes and industries will be so much
more efficient and our economy will be the world leader in the clean power
technologies that every country will want to import from us — climate change or
not — as we add nearly a billion people to the planet by 2030. Yes, there will
be nearly one billion more people on the planet in 10 years.
On the other hand, if we treat climate
change like a daydream and it proves to be a nightmare, we will be in real
trouble as a species.
So, I hope Biden goes into next week’s
debate and just says: “My fellow Americans, you don’t hire an arsonist to put
out forest fires. You don’t hire a divider to heal racial wounds. You don’t
hire a poisoner to clean up your water supply. And most of all — most of all — you don’t hire
someone who pits nature against jobs and jobs against health at a time when we
so clearly need them all and we so clearly can have them all.