Beautiful Coal and Disastrous Droughts
Last night, Trump laid out a racist, xenophobic vision for what a warmed world could look like.

Donald Trump delivers the State of the Union address in the chamber of the US House of Representatives last night in Washington DC.Win McNamee / Getty
Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump did not mention climate change — a reality he may or may not acknowledge — during his first State of the Union Address last night. He did mention the slew of disasters that hit the United States this year, from Hurricanes Irma, Harvey, and Maria to the wildfires that tore through the western United States — all fueled in one way or another by climate change.
What Trump laid out was a racist, xenophobic vision for what a warmed world could look like, and how he intends to keep warming it: promoting “big, beautiful clean coal,” heaping generous tax incentives onto carbon-intensive corporations like ExxonMobil and Chrysler, and empowering Scott Pruitt to treat the Environmental Protection Agency as an arm of the fossil fuel industry.
But his vision for our climate-changed future doesn’t just include opening the floodgates to extraction; there are few policy fields that won’t be touched by climate change at some point in the next century. Take immigration. Climate-fueled droughts in the Middle East contributed to a bloody war that has already forced millions to flee from Syria. One 2010 study found that, by 2080, climate-related causes could send as many as 6.7 million people to the United States from Mexico alone, where temperatures will climb and widespread crop failure could become persistent, compounding the economic pain already created by other destructive US policies.