Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com
The man who might be president insists that climate change is an elaborate, "very expensive hoax," even possibly a "Chinese" one meant to undermine the American economy. It's "bullshit" and "pseudoscience" (on which, it seems, he's an expert). He's said this sort of thing numerous times, always mockingly, always dismissively. Only recently in his Phoenix speech on immigration, on his love of Mexicans, and on what suckers they'll be when it comes to paying for his future wall, he put it this way: "Only the out-of-touch media elites think the biggest problems facing America... it's not nuclear, and it's not ISIS, it's not Russia, it's not China, it's global warming." Those fools! They know nothing. They don't even know that there's a crucial footnote, a lone exception, to The Donald's climate change position: golf.
Though the heating of the planet via fossil fuels couldn't be more of a fantasy, while saving the coal industry, building pipelines, and reversing anything Barack Obama did in the White House to promote alternative energy systems will be the order of the day, it turns out that climate change does threaten one thing. And it's something crucial to human life as we know it: playing 18 holes on a coastal golf course. For that, protection is obviously in order. This is undoubtedly why the man with no fears about drowning coastal communities has, through his company Trump International Golf Links & Hotel Ireland, applied for permission to build "a coastal protection works to prevent erosion at his seaside golf resort in County Clare," based on... yep... the danger of rising sea levels. We're talking about "200,000 tons of rock distributed along two miles of beach." And if permission is finally granted, the result will surely be a "great wall," a "beautiful wall" that will not let a drop of sea water emigrate onto Irish soil.
One small hint for Mr. Trump, should he become president. From the Oval Office, he might consider granting similar wall-building exemptions to key parts of coastal Florida already experiencing a serious rise in what's called "sunny-day flooding." Such walls would protect crucial coastal properties like Mar-a-Lago, his top-of-the-line private club in Palm Beach, which could otherwise find itself "under at least a foot of water for 210 days a year because of tidal flooding" within three decades. It's that or develop a sport called aquatic golf.
As for the rest of us for whom such walls assumedly won't be built, there's always flight inland where we might become... gulp... climate refugees. (In that case, you know what Trump is likely to say about the necessity for our extreme vetting). And while you're waiting for the floodwaters, I suggest that you consider what TomDispatch's invaluable energy expert Michael Klare has to say about the rise of versions of The Donald globally and what that means for the health of our world in "Will Trumpism, Brexit, and Geopolitical Exceptionalism Sink the Planet?"