Tim Kaine: Say Whaaat?

From U.S. Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA), comment below:

"
As the country faces a series of devastating hurricanes and wildfires, President Trump decided to abandon U.S. leadership on climate change this week. He’s ignoring clear evidence that climate change is contributing to more severe natural disasters and rising seas. This decision will not stop the global trend toward cleaner energy, only slow it down and allow other nations, like China, to fill the leadership role the President is vacating.
Communities like Hampton Roads, with risks from flooding and storms, are already dealing with the effects of inaction. They should be a higher priority to the Trump Administration than relieving big energy companies of the responsibility to generate less carbon pollution tomorrow than today.
"

Editorial comment: More severe natural disasters...than what? If we measure the "severity" of natural disasters by property damage, then rising construction costs will guarantee that natural disasters seem ever more severe, especially when they happen to hit overcrowded areas. If we go by any other measure, even by number of lives lost, by number of properties damaged, by isolated weatherquirks like deepest snow or most lightning strikes, then we're not seeing more severe natural disasters than our great-grandparents saw. And if we go by long-term effects on the landscape...what put those ocean-life fossils on the top of the Cumberland Mountains? I'm guessing that the United States, as a nation, have never seen anything comparable to the severity of the natural disasters-at-the-time that separated North America from Britain in prehistoric times...

Shall we try a more profitable question? Is the Trump administration's willingness to relax requirements for carbon-polluting power plants and factories, as it's being rumored to be at some web sites, a slithering sidestep toward "cap and trade" regulations that would blame campfires and wood-burning stoves for all the effects of pollution? Is that something the greedheads on both sides actually want--let them and their high-rolling funders roll right along, while making life harder for ordinary people!--and is that why they persist in ignoring the facts of local warming?

How, in any case, would the use of dirtier energy stop a trend toward cleaner energy? The fact that a factory somewhere failed to replace a chimney cap is what's stopping you or me from installing a few solar panels and telling Appco or Pepco or Dominion Power to call us when they're ready to start paying us? The thrill of seeing unemployed coal miners get back to work on solarizing southwestern Virginia...is being spoiled by the recognition that chimney filters have expiration dates, rather than, y'know, enhanced by it?

Say whaaat?