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.
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