Topline: In a rare instance of criticizing the Trump White House, former President Barack Obama took to Twitter Tuesday to compare the delayed response to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic in the United States to climate change denial after President Donald Trump’s rollback of Obama-era fuel economy standards.
- “We’ve seen all too terribly the consequences of those who denied warnings of a pandemic,” President Obama wrote on Twitter. “We can’t afford any more consequences of climate denial. All of us, especially young people, have to demand better of our government at every level and vote this fall.”
- The rule change to the 2012 regulation, meant to encourage automakers to manufacture more electric and fuel-efficient vehicles, will lower the average miles per gallon required for an automakers’ fleets, from 54 mpg by 2025 to 40 mpg.
- As the New York Times noted, this change will result in an additional billion tons of carbon dioxide emitted over a car’s lifetime than under the previous regulations.
- Others in the party raised concerns about the amendment and the timing of it, with Senator Tom Carper (D-Del.) saying the rule “will lead to dirtier air at a time when our country is working around the clock to respond to a respiratory pandemic whose effects may be exacerbated by air pollution.”
- Obama isn’t the first to link the world’s response to the coronavirus pandemic to the threat of climate change, with Bill Gates during a TED interview saying, “That idea of innovation and science and the world working together, that is totally common between these two problems.”
- University of Cumbria professor Jem Bendell told Bloomberg in an interview this week that, “The fallout from COVID-19 feels like a dress rehearsal for the kind of collapse that climate change threatens . . . this crisis reveals how fragile our current way of life has become.”
Key Background: The country’s preparation and response to the coronavirus has been a point of criticism against the Trump administration. During his daily press briefings and in tweets, Trump has taken the opportunity to blame the previous administration for supply shortages and issues around testing. Trump’s administration, however, cut the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s pandemic response team in 2018 in a bid to lower costs. In 2019, the Department of Health and Human Services ran a test to illustrate how unprepared the country was for an influenza pandemic. And a report from the Washington Post that’s been denied by Trump alleged that officials warned of the severity of the COVID-19 coronavirus throughout January and February while Trump publicly downplayed the disease. During a briefing on February 27, 2020, Trump said, “You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero— that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.” The lack of preparation carries comparisons with climate change denial, with the Trump administration pulling back environmental regulations and leaving the Paris Climate Agreement as countries like China aggressively try to address the oncoming crisis.
Big Number: 177,452. That’s how many cases of the coronavirus have been confirmed in the U.S., according to Johns Hopkins University. The country now leads all others in confirmed cases, with Italy following in second with 105,792.
