Greener Heads Will Prevail
Hoping
to sway blue-collar voters at a rally in
Michigan last week, the former president,
criminal defendant, and GOP frontrunner Donald
Trump leaned into an old cliche: the economy vs.
the environment. “You can be loyal to American
labor or loyal to environmental lunatics,” he
told a crowd of supporters. “You can’t be loyal
to both.”
As
with so many other matters, though, Trump here
is mistaken. In fact, US labor and the economy
are tightly bound to environmental concerns, and
that is becoming more and more obvious. This
week, Bloomberg analysts put
numbers to the facts.
The
cost of burning fossil fuels, Bloomberg
Intelligence found, has averaged about $500
billion a year since 2016. The number represents
“the combined expenses from property damages,
power outages, government spending, and
construction-surge inflation at the state
level,” though it doesn’t even count wages lost
to wildfires or extreme heat, or money sunk into
rising insurance premiums.
That
adds up to trillions of dollars lost, weighing
down the economy and its workers. If candidates
want to win over hard-working US voters, they’ll
soon have to come up with a better message than
the nature-versus-labor fallacy.
Environmental
lunatics? The truly misguided are those who
still cling to a gas-guzzling, plastic-littering
economy that simply won’t hold up. It won’t be
long until most voters figure that out.
In
the meantime, stay focused out there.
| 
