By Mel Gurtov

August 27, 2019 "Information Clearing House" - The President of the United States is a criminal.  I’m not referring to the twenty-odd investigations of him currently underway for violations of the Constitution, obstruction of justice, and collaboration with the Russian election attack, among other misdeeds.  No, I’m referring to his and his administration’s intentional and reckless pursuit of national policies that condemn American and the world’s citizens to environmental destruction and the end of life as we know it.

Specifically, I suggest that Trump should be charged with crimes against humanity. Ordinarily, these are violent crimes on a large scale, such as torture, enslavement, forced deportation, murder, and ethnic cleansing.  But policies that not merely ignore but increase the threat of climate change might be read—and I believe should be read—as creating conditions for mass removal of populations, unprecedented destruction of species and natural resources, mass starvation, and other kinds of suffering on a previously unknown scale.  The International Criminal Court statute in fact specifies “Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.”  No wonder the US is not a party to the court.

Nathaniel Rich’s Losing Earth: A Recent History points out that we have known about the causes and consequences of climate change, and the remedies for it, for over fifty years. Yet time and again politics and corporate interference have trumped science: Scores of reports, many hours of testimony before Congress, and numerous international meetings have resulted in minimal steps that were known in advance to be inadequate.  All administrations share in this indictment, but only one—Trump’s—has very deliberately sought to sabotage its own and the world’s scientific community in order to satisfy the climate denying ideologues and their  corporate partners.

In Trump’s world, facts are the enemy of truth.  This man, who once said he had “a natural instinct for science,” holds to only one truth: money talks. “What I’m not willing to do is sacrifice the economic well-being of our country for something that nobody really knows” (www.politico.com/story/2018/10/17/trump-instinct-climate-change-910004). “Nobody knows”?  Sure, when you drastically limit the role of scientific inquiry in climate change.  Not only was the office of the science advisor eliminated; media access to the tens of thousands of scientists working for the government was severely restricted, as was their ability to present their research at scientific meetings.  Playing politics with science has a long history, during which specialists on climate change have come and gone in Washington.  Even in the best of times their reports have never created the sense of urgency necessary for a national effort to prevent worst cases.  Under Trump science itself has a bad name, and any government report suggesting a crisis is sure to be buried.