John Oliver: Channel Your Hatred of Trump to Fight Climate Change
Without the Paris Agreement, Oliver says it's up to us.
When he announced last Thursday that the U.S. would be pulling out of the Paris Agreement, President Donald Trump said a lot of, well, false things. One particularly strong statement he made was that when the Paris Agreement was originally agreed upon, the world celebrated because the agreement would put the U.S. at a large economic disadvantage.
On Last Night Tonight Sunday, John Oliver could barely contain himself. “What are you talking about?” he said, as if directly to Trump. “They were happy because they secured a landmark victory for the future of the planet, you fucking egomaniac!”
Oliver conceded that nobody was exactly surprised last week when Trump took the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement. “As a title it is so off brand for him it might as well have been called ‘the globalist cuck surrender’ or ‘a light jog,’” he said.
When it comes to global diplomacy around the environment, Oliver is pretty sure that Trump has no idea what he’s talking about. Nor does he understand global warming — he’s called it a hoax several times on Twitter — nor does he even care. Trump’s entire speech on Thursday was such a tirade of misinformation, it had Oliver practically jumping out of his seat as he tried to fact check a litany of false claims.
Trump’s assertion that coal production will be banned in the U.S., for example, but India and China can continue building coal plants because of the Paris Agreement is “just wrong,” according to Oliver. “The Agreement doesn’t actually ban America from building coal plants, it doesn’t even contain the word coal. Each country sets its own goals that it can meet however it wants.”
Oliver says that without the White House on board, the onus to save the planet from imminent destruction should we get two degrees warmer is now the responsibility of politicians at the state and local level. “Unfortunately, that means that you now need to find out where your mayor, your governor, and even your state reps stand on climate change,” he said.
And that might really suck for you if you live in Pennsylvania, for example, where Scott Wagner is a state representative. Wagner apparently thinks global warming is caused by the Earth moving closer to the sun every year — a statement that left Oliver flabbergasted.
“I don’t even know where to start there,” he said. “Yes the Earth moves closer to the sun every year, but then it moves away from the sun, because that is what a fucking year is.”
Things don’t look so good if you live in North Carolina either, where the state representative is Larry Pittman. He believes that the Earth’s climate “runs on a cycle,” going up and down, and that it’s humanity’s hubris to believe that we have any control over something that was designed by God.
If this all sounds pretty bleak, Oliver did manage to offer something of a silver lining. Because of Trump’s decision, the fight to save the Earth may have just found its universal bad guy to unify the masses.
“Apparently it was never quite enough for us to motivate ourselves out of love for this large, gassy orb,” he said pointing to a picture of the Earth.
“But maybe, just maybe, we can now motivate ourselves to do something, out of our loathing of this one,” he said, gesturing to a photo of Donald Trump.
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