Tell people what they want to hear, that is Trump’s contribution to contemporary politics. Americans believe it because they want to believe it. On the contrary, fighting the climate crisis involves changes, even sacrifices.
This is how Manuel Vicent concluded his last Sunday column in The country: “Scientists had warned well in advance of the tragedy that was approaching Valencia and they were not wrong (…). With many tears the dead will be buried, with time this tragedy of Valencia will be forgotten, and for our part we will continue to defy nature, as always, without learning anything.”
I share the sad prediction of the wise writer: in Valencia, throughout Spain, we will continue to build brick beehives in boulevards, valleys, streams and other areas prone to flooding, we will continue to pile up parked cars of two sides of streets as narrow as these. from a Moroccan medina, we will continue to travel everywhere in oil-thirsty vehicles all the time. And of course, we will continue to vote for politicians who do not propose sacrifices in our way of life to combat the greatest material threat facing the future of humanity today: the climate emergency.
I use the first person plural to follow Vicent, but neither he nor I are referring to all of us, we are referring to the majority of people, perhaps the vast majority. That of the United States has just voted in favor of a Donald Trump who denies the existence of climate change and, in his first speech after the victory, explicitly praised the American oil industry, liquid gold of a nation that he prophesied would be great again under his second presidency. This Trump who, in this speech, had admiring words for the “supergenius” Elon Musk for having provided the best solution to the hurricane that devastated North Carolina: his Starlink communications system. “He saved a lot of lives,” Trump said.
Trump is a denialist and the first thing he did when he first won the White House was to withdraw the United States from the half-hearted Paris Accord on climate change. Trump does not believe that human action has anything to do with the fact that today there are so many terrible droughts followed by so many exceptional floods. He believes that such phenomena have always existed and finds nothing strange in the fact that they are more frequent and more intense today. Everything related to the decarbonization of the planet and the use of clean and renewable energies seems to him to be nonsense on the part of the eternal enemies of humanity, the scum that his Argentinian disciple Milei contemptuously calls “the leftists “.
It turns out that polls have proven for the second time that the majority of Americans believe in Trump. They believe in him as one believes in a religion, with a faith that reason and science cannot break. And why do they believe it? Because they want to believe it. Because the opposite, trying not to continue to harm the planet, involves changes, even sacrifices. Like what a drug addict has to do to get out of their addiction. Stop consuming dirty energies. Stop deforesting the planet. Stop building anywhere. Stop seeing everything in life as a business opportunity. Stop worshiping money.
It’s raining mud on mud. As minutes of silence are observed across Europe for the enormous human and material damage caused by the floods in Valencia, Trump’s victory is disastrous news for Mother Earth. The second most polluting country in the world – China is the first – will continue to produce smoke and waste in colossal quantities. And Trump’s political epigones, the far right of Milei, Bolsonaro, Ayuso, Abascal and company, see their path to absolute power endorsed in American polls: municipal, regional, national, judicial, economic and media.
As simple as it is, this formula is even simplistic. Namely nationalism –USA, USA, USA!Trump supporters were chanting tribally after the victory, hatred of dark-skinned immigrants, hoax culture – there are no more truths and lies, dammit -, messianism – “God has saved life to heal America”, Trump Dixit– and climate denial. This is the winning electoral recipe in the West.
Telling people what they want to hear is Trump’s great contribution to contemporary politics. Alerting people in the middle of the school and work day? Change car for a less polluting car? Install solar panels? Ban construction on boulevards, valleys and streams? Create flood-prone natural spaces? Wow, how lazy, this is just bullshit. Pedro Sánchez, blacks and Moors are responsible for the flood. You vote for the ultras and maybe one day you will become rich like Elon Musk and be able to buy a small piece of land on the planet Mars for when the Earth is unlivable.
