Hillary Clinton Took to Twitter to Explain a Climate Change Report the Trump Administration Tried to Bury
On Friday afternoon, while many of us were either shopping, relaxing, or snacking on Thanksgiving leftovers, the Trump administration quietly released its National Climate Assessment — a report on the state of climate change, and its projected impact, a month ahead of schedule.
While most of us may not have noticed, former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton did, and she took to Twitter on Monday afternoon to not only note that the bipartisan document exists, but to also point out that the findings inside are a scary call to arms that we do something immediately about the environment.
“The Trump administration tried to bury a federally-mandated climate change study by releasing it the Friday after Thanksgiving,” Clinton began. “Here’s what they didn’t want you to hear: ‘With continued growth in emissions at historic rates, annual losses in some economic sectors are projected to reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century — more than the current GDP of many US states,” she wrote, quoting the report.
Clinton’s tweets continued by highlighting some of the scariest socio-economic impacts that climate change will have on the US, including continued damage to infrastructure, ecosystems, and social structures due to extreme weather. She also pointed out that industries such as agriculture, tourism, and fisheries will be hit with long-term financial difficulties as a result of climate change. We owe it to future generations, she tweeted, to slow down climate change.
But if former Secretary of State Clinton is sharing the report, why is the Trump administration not discussing it? According to the Associated Press, President Trump told reporters on Monday that he doesn’t believe the assessment, which points to the rising number of natural disasters, drought, and floods as evidence of the effects of climate change already in motion. The report also warns that doing nothing to halt its progression will cost more in the long run than acting to stop climate change now.
And like the UN report released in October of this year that warned that we have a decade or less to turn things around before we lose our ability to repair the damage we’ve done to the earth, the National Climate Assessment says we must act now, and are running out of time.
The National Climate Assessment is created every four years by the US Global Change Research Program to “assist the Nation and the world to understand, assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change.”
The assessment is one of the world’s most robust climate change documents and is the work of a combined 300 scientists across 13 intergovernmental agencies including NASA and the Department of Defense. This year’s findings — which span 1,600 pages of data — focus on the billions of dollars the US will lose if we continue down this climate path, and point explicitly to the abundance of data that explains that humanity is the cause of the climate crisis.
(Photo by Mike Coppola/Getty Images)