Trump is a climate denier and he's packing his administration with climate deniers; as Peter Watts pointed out, Trump "seems to think that the laws of politics and of physics somehow carry equal weight, that he can negotiate with the heat capacity of the world’s oceans ('Okay, we’ll cut our bitumen production by 15%, but then you have to increase your joules/kelvin by at least 5…')."
But reality has a well-known liberal bias, and that means that when Trump contemplates a low-lying resort on the Irish coastline, he has to prepare for the coming superstorms and sea-level rises by erecting a 13-foot-tall seawall around the property.
He will deny the climate protection America desperately needs, but trample on the local council in foreign lands to protect his own investments. He's been at it since 2014, but (irony alert) floods and storms washed away his first attempt.
The local county council halted the construction and Trump’s wall was thwarted by the tiny, narrow-mouthed whorl snail, which lives in the dunes. The snail, around since the ice age but now endangered, is protected in Ireland, and binding conditions in the original planning permission demand regular monitoring to ensure activities on the golf course do not endanger it. The snail has become a mascot for those opposing the wall, with organizations such as Friends of the Irish Environment, Save the Waves and local surfer associations backing a #NatureTrumpsWalls campaign. More than 100,000 people have signed an online petition to “Stop Trump’s Irish Wall”.
Trump's other wall: is his Irish resort a sign he believes in climate change?
[Caelainn Hogan/The Guardian]
(Images: Trump Doonbeg, Pacific Ocean Horizon, Oscar Cortez, CC-BY-SA)
