Planet Trump: California’s environmental community prepares for the frightening enigma that is the next president

In his free time, environmental scientist Dana Nuccitelli teaches audiences how to respond to an uncle who claims “galactic cosmic rays” are what really cause climate change.

In talks given around the state, Nuccitelli translates peer-reviewed findings into everyday language to dispel myths and connect to skeptics. There are plenty of them these days, including the soon-to-be most powerful man in the free world.

In the fifth-warmest November ever recorded, Americans elected Donald Trump—a man who has said “nobody really knows” if climate change is happening.

Nuccitelli acknowledges that even some believers think that climate change will “happen in the future to somebody else.” But he stresses that it’s happening right now, to everyone.

In California, climate change stretched the drought, inflamed wildfires and diminished the snowpack, which refills state reservoirs. Offshore, the warming of the planet raises sea levels, ups the odds of extreme weather phenomena like El Niño and makes the ocean more acidic, threatening coral reefs and the bottom of the food chain, which holds up the entire marine ecosystem.

As Trump remakes the White House, scientists fear a clash between their findings and the new president’s policies regarding a massive infrastructure project, the extraction of fossil fuels from national lands and the transition (or lack thereof) toward more renewable forms of energy.

Nuccitelli, who also blogs for The Guardian, notes that some scientists, like UC Davis’ Nick Santos, have begun transferring government data to private servers to prevent potential tampering or muzzling by the incoming administration.

It’s happened before.

Following a 2006 investigation, NASA’s inspector general concluded President George W. Bush’s administration had “reduced, marginalized or mischaracterized climate change science made available to the general public.”

Earl Withycombe, a California Air Resources Board engineer and member of the Environmental Council of Sacramento, or ECOS, adds that President Trump’s ability to command media attention will suck up time that could be devoted to the coverage of climate findings. “As those stories get crowded out, public support for climate protection may diminish,” he said.

It’s already happening.

According to a paper co-written by Nuccitelli, 97 percent of scientists agree climate change is happening and human beings cause it. Yet, according to a Pew Research Center poll, only 27 percent of Americans believe that such a consensus exists, and less than half believe humans are responsible for climate change.

“Facts by themselves aren’t enough,” Nuccitelli told SN&R. “If a fact conflicts with an ideological belief, people will just reject the fact and look for information that supports their belief. It’s a tough question: If facts aren’t enough, then what is it going to take?”

When it comes to national policy, Trump has been short on details, but big on vague promises.

During the campaign, he repeatedly vowed to fund a national infrastructure bill costing up to $1 trillion, including support for pipelines and coal shipping. Trump proposes to fund this mostly by offering tax breaks to large business for the operation of “toll road”-type projects, where they could steadily recoup their investments.

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg’s chief of staff, Mike McKeever, sees this idea as insufficient.

“With [expanding public] transit or maintaining roads or fixing patchy sewer lines or leaky roofs in school buildings, there’s no revenue stream that comes with that,” said McKeever, a former regional planner with an emphasis on smart growth and sustainability. “And so, it’s hard to figure out how giving tax breaks is going to do much good in those areas, all of which are pretty important to us.”

After the half-cent sales tax proposed by Measure B narrowly failed, McKeever says the mayor’s office has only embarked on preliminary conversations for raising money for public transit—a financial obligation that he says has been increasingly left to local governments to figure out.

But the city needs federal approval for projects like the 4.2-mile streetcar line proposed to connect to West Sacramento over the Tower Bridge. The $200 million project would seek half of its funding from the federal level, funding that Trump’s administration has to approve.

“If the federal transit funds get cut, we’re in a world of hurt,” McKeever said.

Trump has also insinuated he would open up federal lands for excavation. In California, that makes 45.8 percent of the state vulnerable. Should Trump target these lands, Laurie Litman of 350 Sacramento, which backs local initiatives to reduce greenhouse gases, says that her group and others, like ECOS and the Citizens’ Climate Lobby, will be ready to aid legal action against the new administration.

At the state level, the Legislature just retained former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s law firm for $25,000 a month for assistance if and when conflicts arise between state and federal policies. Gov. Jerry Brown has also flung himself into the limelight against Trump by pledging to “launch our own damn satellite” to collect climate data, while also urging President Barack Obama to do what he can in his final days in office.

But some Californians hesitate to anoint Brown the state’s savior and contend California squandered some opportunities to protect the environmental high ground.

The Sierra Club opposes Brown’s pet project, the twin tunnels, fearing a disruption of the Delta’s ecosystem, which could spawn unpredictable ripple effects.

Consumer Watchdog found that Brown received $9.8 million from 26 energy companies in contributions to his causes and the Democratic Party. And in 2015, California’s Department of Conservation overhauled its approach to the oil, gas and geothermal resources industries, by installing a new director, David Bunn, and bolstering its enforcement team after it failed to “live up to its regulatory responsibilities.”

Additionally, Catherine Garoupa White, coordinator of Californians Against Fracking, points out that Brown’s cap-and-trade policy has paradoxically led to some increases in greenhouse gas emissions, especially in the electrical sector. These facilities tend to be concentrated in poorer neighborhoods with higher populations of people of color. Sustained exposure to greenhouse gases negatively impacts a person’s health, education, income and productivity, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which could be significantly weakened under Trump.

“We compartmentalize the impacts of our consumeristic lifestyle,” Garoupa White said. “It’s easy for people to consume fossil fuels endlessly with no consciousness of what the impacts are if they don’t live in one of those communities that’s suffering.”

Plus, there’s fracking—injecting high-pressure wastewater into subterranean rocks to loosen gas and oil reserves—which Trump supports and Brown has done little to curb. No computer model can predict what fracking will do to an area.

A Nobel Peace Prize winning group, Physicians for Social Responsibility, recently released a report that compiled the evidence gathered on the mining practice. The conclusion: “[F]racking poses significant threats to air, water, health, public safety, climate stability, seismic stability, community cohesion, and long-term economic vitality.”

A fracking well in Aliso Canyon recently hosted the biggest natural gas spill in state history. Lasting from October 23, 2015, to February 18, 2016, it dumped an estimated 97,000 tons of methane into the atmosphere. Methane possesses a global warming potential 86 times that of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. Aliso Canyon’s carbon footprint is considered larger than the Deepwater Horizon spill. Due to increased headaches, nausea and nosebleeds, more than 11,000 people were relocated temporarily.

Which is to say that, even in stable times, environmental progress is a relative concept. But with a wild card in the Oval Office? It’s all hands on deck to prevent backsliding.

Some environmentalists want Trump to know that saving the world and making a buck aren’t mutually exclusive.

Jennifer Wood, Sacramento chapter leader of the Citizens’ Climate Lobby, argues that companies have failed to factor the costly side effects of fossil fuels into their pricing. So the CCL has pushed federal legislation for a revenue-neutral carbon fee and dividend, which would fine carbon emissions, then return that money to citizens equally in the form of rebate checks—a measure that would provide the most relief to the working and middle classes.

California’s Legislature approved a resolution recommending such a measure to the federal government. The House of Representatives recently formed the bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus. And even Trump’s prospective nominee for secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, taxed carbon while CEO of ExxonMobil.

The tax would hit carbon as soon as it entered the marketplace, making all forms of fossil fuel consumption more expensive, incentivizing a shift toward renewable energy sources like solar and wind, which employed 769,000 Americans in 2015. These sources are rapidly becoming cost-competitive with fossil fuels, which directly employ roughly 2 million, especially with companies like Tesla working on cheaper batteries to store that energy.

Both Nuccitelli and Wood think that Republican members of Congress could be swayed by the massive potential for jobs, as the solar industry grew 12 times faster than the rest of the economy in 2015. And besides, China has pledged to invest over $360 billion into wind, hydro, solar and nuclear power programs by 2020 to generate half of their new electricity—which could pump Trump’s competitive juices.

“Clean energy creates a lot of jobs,” said Jim Lerner, an engineer and another member of CCL. “I think Trump is going to find out about this and say, ’You know, I don’t think they should be No. 1. I think we should be No. 1.’”

But ultimately, Trump remains an enigma. Quintessentially, he threatened to pull out of the international Paris Agreement, but also pledged to listen to businesses, 630 of which signed a letter opposing that action.

“The future is much more unpredictable than I have seen in most of my lifetime,” said Withycombe, the 70-year-old engineer.

Withycombe points to a divide in the country. He supports efforts to resist Trump, but believes they don’t address what spurred his election. Only 32 percent of Trump voters listed the environment as “very important” to them. What was “very important?” Ninety percent listed the economy, 89 percent listed terrorism and 79 percent listed immigration.

“Unless we change the economic structure to make sure that citizens have a minimally adequate safety net, we’re going to continue to see these sorts of electoral revolts and continued levels of anxiety among many citizens that something is vitally wrong,” he said. “Something that the country is not willing to fix.”

Lerner agreed. Speaking to SN&R by phone, shortly after playing with his two 18-month-old grandchildren, Lerner recalled a reunion days earlier at MIT, where he found that five in 10 of his fraternity brothers—lawyers, doctors and Ph.D.s in engineering—didn’t believe in climate change because “their tribe tells them it’s not real.” He wondered what that meant for the future of the infants he had held in his arms.