November 20, 2018
President Donald Trump
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20500
Dear President Trump:
You call yourself a nationalist. People on the left, of
course, think that nationalism is a bad thing in and of itself, but I think it
depends what purpose nationalism is harnessed to. If it were harnessed to the cause
of dealing effectively with climate change, it would be a very good thing
indeed.
The problem is, you don’t acknowledge the reality of man-made
climate change, and as long as you don’t, other countries—notably China—will
corner the market on the emerging technologies that deal with it, many of which
we actually invented. Is that really what you want?
No, instead, we should try to control the commanding heights
of these environmental technologies ourselves. We should dominate the market in
them. We should also emphasize environmental nationalism rather than military
nationalism. If we limited our military to a truly defensive posture—just
enough to make sure that nobody tangles with us or our allies— we could devote
a significant portion of the savings to research and development for
renewables, energy conservation, carbon removal, maybe nuclear power.
You should summon up all of the nation’s intellectual, economic,
and social resources to deal with this crisis. In the wake of the launch of the
Soviet Sputnik satellite in 1957, President Eisenhower proposed and Congress
approved, on a bipartisan basis, the National Defense Education Act. The
purpose of the act was to train more scientists and mathematicians to meet the
Soviet challenge. Later, President Kennedy set the goal of putting a man on the
moon by the end of the 1960s. This was an explicitly nationalist goal, yet it
wasn’t criticized on that account. Although Kennedy never lived to see it, the
goal was realized in 1969. Rather than a National Defense Education Act, we need
a National Climate and Energy Education Act to train the nation’s youth to address
the climate crisis. Beyond that, we need to marshal all the nation’s resources
to meet this challenge.
Toward that end, we should create a Climate and Energy
Research Projects Agency (CERPA) based on the model of the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
You should become an environmental nationalist. Then the adversary
wouldn’t be ‘the climate’—that’s too abstract. No, the adversary would then
become China. Everybody can understand that. I certainly don’t want the Chinese
controlling these technologies. Do you?
You pride yourself on being a realist, but you’re not being
realistic about this at all. You’re being woefully, willfully ignorant about
the reality of man-made climate change. You should take a tip from the medieval
English king Canute. In order to counter the assertion of some flattering courtiers that he was
above even natural laws, Canute set his throne by the sea shore and commanded
the incoming tide to halt and not wet his feet and robes. Yet of course the
tide continued to rise as usual and dashed over his feet and legs without
respect to his royal person. So King Canute leapt backwards, saying, “Let all
men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none
worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.”
In other words, nobody—not even you—can defy the laws of physics and chemistry.
A word to the wise, pal.
Yours etc.,
Jonathan Greenblume
