The Crucial Years – Hands off…the future. So many ways to wreck an economy, and Trump is trying them all…”Mark Gongloff and Elaine He at Bloomberg produced a remarkable timeline [no paywall] the other day showing in enormous detail how the Trump administration had, in a matter of weeks, undone twenty years worth of efforts to do something about the climate crisis. It’s not like the U.S. had been providing sterling leadership, but “nothing could have prepared us for the breadth or intensity of the assault on climate action that Trump has unleashed during his first months back in office.”

Every agency with any connection to the climate (meaning basically all of them) has been involved, from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Defense Department. International cooperation by NASA scientists, UN diplomats and more has been forbidden, and Trump appointees are meddling in state and local efforts to manage their own environments. Elon Musk’s crew, intent on dismantling the apparatus of government, has frozen research and funding and put vital expertise on the street.

As a result of this all-out effort to destroy climate action here and abroad, the analysts at the big banks declared last week that the effort to hold temperature increases to two degrees Celsius—never mind the 1.5 degree target we set at Paris—are probably dead.

“We now expect a 3°C world,” Morgan Stanley analysts wrote earlier this month, citing “recent setbacks to global decarbonization efforts.”

To reiterate—this is not a statement about physics, which hasn’t changed in the last three months. It’s a statement about politics. And to be entirely clear, the big banks have done nothing to change that politics in any way—indeed, as they’ve all withdrawn from the Net Zero Banking Alliance in recent months, they’ve done their best to abet Trump’s efforts. And they don’t care now—As Politico pointed out, they’re eagerly figuring out ways to make money off the end of the world…