A Plea to Americans: Please Vote for the Planet
Dr. Andrew Rosenberg on Trump vs. the Environment
“Whatever your issue is, should you be concerned? Yes! …This is not a time to sit it out.” - Dr. Andrew Rosenberg
On Project 2025: “It’s worse than you think it is. No matter how bad you think it is, it’s worse.” - Dr. Andrew Rosenberg
This is the scariest interview I’ve ever done. It may also be the most important.
Dr. Andrew Rosenberg is the former director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists and former director of NOAA and wow is he concerned about what it means for democracy and science if Americans don’t vote for Kamala Harris on Tuesday and re-elects a man who thinks he can more hurricanes with a magic Sharpie.
I don’t understand how any American is pretending this election is about any other issue than whether America wants to keep having elections, but for anyone who’s pretending there’s anything remotely environmentally-friendly about, say, voting for Jill Stein and her imaginary Greens (as Greens around the world beg her to drop out of the race) here’s a look at Trump vs. science, facts and the planet.
For more, please visit Andrew Rosenberg’s Substack:
I’ve never just shared our show notes here before but, for this episode, here they are
Shownotes:
4:11 Andrew Rosenberg explains what the Union of Concerned Scientists is concerned about and how the focus shifted from weapons to using science to spin for politicians.
7:00 “Everyone will ask what are you concerned about… until Mr. Trump was elected and then nobody needed to ask that question anymore because it was pretty obvious what we were concerned about.”
8:00 Trump’s wasn’t the first administration to distort facts. “Everything that was talked about the facts became whatever Mr. Trump said they were at any given moment and that was not the same thing from one moment to the next. And in our current presidential campaign that’d gotten even worse.”
8:52 The futility of fact-checking when “everybody’s in their little bubbles in the social media age.”
11:06 Why the Trump administration kept losing their challenges in court and how Project 2025 will stop the courts from ignoring laws.
11:51 “We also leaned into the ideas that scientists can and should be much more active in the political process.” And the resistance to that…
16:45 How to challenge lies. What works, what doesn’t and why. “We’re not going to turn everybody into scientists.”
22:07 The impact of COVID and isolation on fact-based reality.
23:10 “Anybody can say anything on social media.”
28:45 On Project 2025: “It’s worse than you think it is. No matter how bad you think it is, it’s worse.”
33:41 “President Trump was frustrated that people didn’t just do what he wanted.” ‘cause laws and consciences…
35:20 “It’s 900 pages long and covers every agency.” The end of NOAA… the end of science and research… and privatizing the weather service and…. yeah it’s worse…
37:00 Everybody becomes a political appointee… You’re fired! “You would choose people based on their loyalty, not their expertise.”
39:15 Sharpiegate! How Trump moved a hurricane – so he could send money to a state he liked.
43:25 You can imagine what it will be like if he’s back in office. It will be worse… things will get a lot worse.”
44:00 “There’s no tethering to facts at all… it’s just whatever he happens to think about it at a given time.
48:04 BC water moving to California?
49:00 “I don’t believe he understands the sovereignty of other nations. Or cares.”
55:00 What you can do…
51:25 “Whatever your issue is, should you be concerned? Yes!”
51:52 “This is not a time to sit it out.”
