CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Air-Brushing of Climate Change

Photo by William Bossen on Unsplash

When Stalin wanted to get rid of someone, he didn’t just have them executed with a shot to the back of the head. He attempted to remove the offending person from history as well by excising their name from encyclopedias and airbrushing their image from photographs. In one infamous photo of two dozen Communist leaders from 1920, so many of them were declared “enemies of the people” in subsequent years that the official photo ended up with only Lenin and writer Maxim Gorky standing on the steps of a conspicuously empty porch. In other altered snapshots, Stalin stands alone in the depopulated space.

Donald Trump is no stranger to such visual manipulations, though he tends to add himself rather than subtract others. He has depicted himself as Jesus, as a U.S. Olympic hockey player scoring a goal and beating up Canadian opponents, as a sunbather with other Cabinet members in the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool. One of his ardent followers in the House, Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), proposed a bill last year to add Trump to Mt. Rushmore, though Trump beat her to the punch five year earlier with a tweet inserting himself next to the Founding Fathers.

Despite his preference to overpopulate the visual universe with his own image, Trump has also developed his own process of elimination. He has compiled an enemy list—former FBI director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, Senator Mark Kelly—that he’s been targeting with legal suits and character assassination campaigns. Not content to focus on the present, he has actively been trying to expunge from federal websites, publications, and parks all the non-white, non-male historical figures that previous campaigns saved from obscurity.

But perhaps the most dangerous effort at air-brushing involves climate change. Trump has gone out of his way to turn the United States from a lukewarm advocate of measures to reduce carbon emissions to a stone-cold denier that climate change is even happening. Trump is notoriously upset at not being at the top of every list—best president, smartest guy in the room, most creative hairstyle. Let’s throw in one more list: greatest threat to humanity. Perhaps in order to top that list, too, the president has downgraded the threat of climate change to the point of non-existence. Like Stalin, Trump now stands alone.

The administration’s campaign started with the scrubbing of all references to climate change from federal websites. It has encouraged more widespread self-censorship: anyone who wants to keep their federal job or apply for a federal grant has tactically removed anything Green-related from their descriptions and applications. This animus toward anything climate-related has also shaped many of the administration’s latest budget cuts: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) budget halved, $1.6 billion cut from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the $4 billion Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program eliminated, $449 million in renewable energy funding slashed.

It’s no surprise that the administration has gone after states that have retained strong climate policies. The Justice Department has targeted Vermont and New York........

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