The Catastrophically Stupid Metaphysics of Climate Deniers

We're the midst of yet another record-hot year. Nevertheless, this week, Trump goons fulfilled yet another Project 2025 threat and proposed scrapping the "endangerment finding" that underlies the U.S. EPA's regulation of the greenhouse gases causing our climate crisis. For those unfamiliar, an "endangerment finding" meets a requirement under the Clean Air Act that a substance "cause[s], or contribute[s] to, air pollution which may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public health or welfare" to qualify it to be regulated. A less stupidity-stacked Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that greenhouse gases merited review under this standard; in 2009, after massively extensive documentation and responses to comments, EPA made the no-shit-Sherlock finding that they do indeed endanger public health and welfare by unraveling the relatively stable climate systems that our societies and infrastructure were built around. MAGA loves them some fossil fueled climate destruction, though. It profits the wealthy, disproportionately hurts the marginalized, and triggers the libs! So now we're looking at rolling that back.

I slogged through the enraging press materials and agency documents around this decision to assess how much was driven by an insistence on considering things separately, in isolation and with heavy essentialism and reductionism, as fascists are wont to do. Guess what? It turns out to be quite a lot! And guess what else? This is a result of Trumpists' unstated but foundational commitment to the most extreme forms of map-metaphysics, which also underlie and tie in with their competitive hierarchalism, extractivism, culture-nature opposition, rigid gender binaries, flattening standardization, and obsessions with monetary and relative-status-affirming measures of value. Map-metaphysics treats existence like a "collection of objects": separate, idealized, decontextualized, black-and-white, with determinate and linear causality, and subject entirely to the rational prediction and rightful control of powerful men and/or their divine or technological deities. It's been dominant in Euro-Western cultures since its formalization by Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greece and reformulation by Descartes in the early Enlightenment.

The actual territory of reality is irrefutably much more complex, dynamic, emergent, and interdependent than the separating and simplifying map the Trumpists are trying to terraform the world into. As this blog is all about, convergent evidence from physics to biology to social sciences to cognitive sciences and more all demonstrate that it's less wrong to understand the things that constitute existence—including people—as relational processes, not separate and essentialized substances. Those of us opposing MAGA destruction would benefit from seeing these two directions clearly and uniting around the reality-based one. All of us live in process-relational reality. What's more, most of us know it already, even if we don't know we know because of the stigmas around talking "metaphysics."

Here's some more detail on how MAGA's bad-faith arguments in their anti-endangerment-finding proposal are built on a brittle metaphysical map that they confuse with the territory. With some effort, I limited myself to ten examples.

• The proposal isolates a narrowly defined regulatory cost column as the sole value consideration that matters. It downplays even the monetarily quantifiable benefits of regulation in terms of avoided costs of climate destruction. Most businesses and the overall economy will indeed suffer greatly from inadequately addressed climate change. Of course, the argument totally ignores harder to quantify but still real costs of unraveling planetary systems with which we are utterly interdependent. This is an irresponsible and blatant refusal of holistic, which is to say realistic, consideration of costs and benefits. That, in turn, depends on a misunderstanding of things as fundamentally isolatable, essentializable, and objectively rankable in terms of mattering.
• The proposal pretends as though the United States can go it alone ("energy independence," eyeroll), as though the fates of all the nations and peoples of the world aren't intertwined with one another and that of our planet. Similarly, it acts as though a 4+% share of the world's climate pollution must be beneath what it means to "cause or contribute to" the total air pollution. By this goofily separating and reductionist logic, nothing causes or contributes to greenhouse gas emissions or climate change, so it must not exist.
• The proposal focuses on the most immediate time scales, rejecting any hint of responsibility to future generations in favor of near-term internal combustion engine car sales. Such narrow-beam, static vision is characteristic of map-metaphysics.
• Obviously, the proposal focuses only on (some) humans, with zero value assigned to other species or natural features. The original endangerment finding did this too, because American and other Euro-Western laws are very anthropocentric, but it still sucks.
• The proposal purports to be aghast at the "mental leaps" the Obama Administration took to... consider how systems work and empirically connect greenhouse gases, climate change, and climate change impacts. If a substance itself is not inherently bad and locally poisonous by being breathed in, the Trumped EPA argues, it cannot be contextually bad as a matter of amount, timing, combination, and impacts on systems. Refusing to consider that systems, contexts, and relations matter is consistently at the heart of mistaking simplified maps of reality for the territory.
• This argument in the proposal about air pollutants needing to "make impure or unclean by contact or mixture" (citing the dictionary, eyeroll) also illustrates map-metaphysics' idealization and fetishization of purity. In actual process-relational reality, purity is mostly illusory, entanglements abound, and nature never draws a line without smudging it.
• The proposal's arguments with respect to "cause or contribute" and so-called "ordinary causation standards" epitomize map-metaphysics' insistence on absolute certainty and simple linear causation, as opposed to more complex emergence.
• The proposal asserts, contrary to overwhelming and horrifying evidence, that the continuing rise in atmospheric greenhouse gases has not produced "the degree of adverse impacts to public health and welfare in the United States that the EPA anticipated in the 2009 Endangerment Finding." It bases this assertion largely on the hastily produced work of five fringe "climate contrarians" (all white of course, aged 60-75, 80% men) hand-picked by Trump's goons to downplay climate change impacts and the harms of fossil fuels. This exemplifies map-metaphysics' tendency to ignore glaring red flags against credibility and to narrow information sources to favored in-group authorities, contrary to best practices for getting things less wrong.
• The proposal overstates how much the Obama Administration's careful actions to address a growing crisis were "unprecedented," which is ironic from an Administration bragging about speed-running through unprecedented actions at an unprecedented pace of destruction. The argument also ironically suggests that the change from the Bush Administration to the Obama Administration delegitimized the shift in direction taken by the latter, while arguing that the election of Trump is sufficient to justify massive policy reversals. And a bit hilariously, after the conservative movement worked for decades to eliminate judicial deference to agency experts, the proposal asserts broad agency discretion. Only for the Trumped EPA, though, not for any discretion exercised by the Obama or Biden EPA. All these apparent hypocrisies are actually classic instances of Wilhoit's Law, with Republican ideologues as the in-group who the law protects but does not bind, and Democrats and scientists as the separate and inferior out-groups who the law binds but does not protect. Under map metaphysics' rigid hierarchy, those at the top deserve to dominate and humiliate those below. (OK, maybe this is a three-fer making this overall list a dirty dozen examples.)
• The proposal's legal components throw both originalism and textualism out the window to argue that if Congress had wanted EPA to address climate pollution endangering public health and welfare, they would have used different words than the ones they did that authorized EPA to address air pollution endangering public health and welfare. Again, from their beliefs in inherent dominance, fascists assert the right to play legal Calvinball. Whatever it takes to terraform the world into their preferred map with themselves top and center.

I fully expect the Trumpists to push through with this deregulatory action despite all evidence, though pushback is still valuable (I'll update this post with a link to submit public comments when one is available). I fully expect the corrupt Supreme Court to eventually uphold it. That doesn't mean there's no hope for advocates of climate sanity and justice, however. Take it from someone with decades of experience in federal policymaking: the best, most enduring actions aren't top-down but bottom-up and sideways, engaging state and local multisolving action with global solidarity. My biggest source of hope is seeing how many people are awakening to the drag that misdirected map-metaphysics and its associated othering have had on human and planetary flourishing for centuries, and to the possibilities of diverse process-relational ways of understanding and stewarding the world for addressing our intertwined megacrises together and building regenerative ways of being. There's a lot of space for coalitional realignment in defense of everything that matters against those would burn it all for the sake of ultimately made-up numbers.