Our denier-in-chief needs to be replaced

The wildfires are burning. Out of control. Consuming millions of acres and who knows how many structures up and down our entire West Coast. Killing untold numbers of plants and animals, and threatening and killing people, too. There is no telling when or how it will all end.

Meantime, despite the in-your-face reality of this wildfire catastrophe and all the weather/climate-related disasters we’ve experienced, many continue to ignore the fact of human-caused climate change. What is happening is exactly what scientists have been predicting will happen as the earth’s climate warms.

Denier-in-Chief Donald Trump and his fact-denying administration and congressional cohorts apparently still think climate change is a hoax. They are silent on the matter, as they continue to pursue and implement policies that only hasten the total tragedy in history’s ever-nearer future. It’s a wonder to me that people still believe them, but millions of us have been bought off by the lies of the fossil fuel industry, the primary driver of the rapid rise in global temperatures.

We know this administration denied the COVID-19 crisis until it could deny it no more. People had to be getting sick and dying by the thousands before it showed the slightest serious interest in the pandemic. We now learn that the president feared the truth would “create a panic” among the American people.

Imagine…

An aid tells President Franklin Roosevelt, “Japan has just bombed Pearl Harbor.”

And the president responds, “Well, that’s terrible, but let’s not tell the American people lest they panic.”

Here in Ohio we have a Republican (yes, that’s correct) governor who told us the bad news about COVID-19 and calmly directed us through the worst of it, at least up until now. We didn’t all like what Gov. DeWine told us or ordered us to do, but we did it. I saw little evidence of panic except among Republicans to the right of him, solidly in the Trump camp, who panic at the slightest dose of truth.

We need to turn this around before it’s too late, which it may be already. We need to get back into the driver’s seat of combating climate change by resuming our place at the table of nations, by restoring at least the clean energy and environmental-protecting policies of the Obama years, if not going beyond them. We need to elect a new president to take office next January who understands that any economic game plan that does not include policies to slow down, if not halt, climate change is not worth the paper it’s printed on.

Joe Biden will be such a president. Donald Trump will never be.

I know many supporters of the current president stay with him because of what he promises yet to do to save “unborn children” and to turn back the clock on civil rights for all Americans, even to the point of nominating Ted Cruz to sit on the Supreme Court. I recognize, sometimes appreciate, your passion and single-mindedness.

But I do not fathom your willingness to let planet earth become hell in your quest to make it into what you apparently think will approximate heaven. Is that a deal you really want to make? To me, it’s a deal with the devil.