“Climate denial was never about doubt. It was about deciding who gets to breathe and who is ‘too expensive.’”
- adaptationguide.com
Will We Ever Learn? Or Is Human Life Officially Worth Zero Now?
To uncover facts in today’s White House, one would probably need clairvoyant abilities—or a Ouija board. What we do know, right at the outset, is this: the United States plans to withdraw from 66 international organizations, including 35 linked to the United Nations. Which ones exactly? How much money will supposedly be saved? Silence. Fog. Shrugs.
But we are assured they must be dark and dangerous alliances, because the Trump administration justifies its retreat with familiar incantations: “hostile agendas,” “radical climate policy,” “globalism.” The words are vague, but the intent is crystal clear: withdraw from reality, then declare victory.
The full list is buried in an executive order signed by President Donald Trump. Among the casualties are the International Institute for Justice and the Rule of Law, the UN office protecting children in armed conflict, and the UN Peacebuilding Fund. Apparently, justice, children, and peace are now considered optional luxuries.
Environmental and energy-related institutions fare even worse. The most consequential withdrawal is from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)—a move so historically ignorant it borders on parody. The UNFCCC was signed in 1992 by Republican President George H. W. Bush and ratified unanimously by the U.S. Senate. Not exactly a leftist coup.
And let’s not romanticize that moment too much: the UNFCCC is famously mild. It imposes no binding emission cuts, only voluntary cooperation and dialogue. Its greatest crime? It eventually made the Paris Climate Agreement possible.
Trump announced withdrawal from Paris on the first day of his second term. That alone was reckless. But abandoning the UNFCCC goes further—much further. It makes future reentry harder (likely requiring a two-thirds Senate majority) and sends an unmistakable signal: the U.S. government would prefer to stop talking about climate change altogether.
If the problem disappears from conversation, it can be replaced with something else. Preferably with “alternative facts.”
That explains the simultaneous withdrawal from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—the world’s leading scientific body on climate impacts. The IPCC does not make policy. It compiles evidence. Data. Consensus. Facts. Which is precisely the problem.
Because under this administration, facts do not emerge from evidence. They emerge from the president’s ego. Science is expected not to discover truth, but to kneel before it.
And this is where the madness becomes lethal.
When Saving Human Lives Is Counted as Zero
In a move that should stop any sane person cold, the Environmental Protection Agency now plans to calculate only the cost to industry when setting pollution limits—not the value of human lives saved.
For decades, the EPA justified clean-air rules by tallying avoided asthma attacks, hospitalizations, and premature deaths. Not anymore.
This is not a technical adjustment. It is a moral rupture.
Environmental law experts call it seismic—and they’re right. The EPA’s mission statement explicitly says its core responsibility is to protect human health and the environment. Under Trump, that responsibility is being rewritten: protect profits first, people later—or never.
This change makes it far easier to repeal pollution limits on coal-fired power plants, oil refineries, steel mills, and industrial facilities nationwide. Cleaner air becomes “too expensive.” Dirtier air becomes policy.
Let’s be clear about what that means.
Fine particulate matter (PM2.5)—particles small enough to enter the bloodstream—causes asthma, heart disease, lung damage, and premature death. Even moderate exposure damages lungs as much as smoking.
Ozone, the main component of smog, worsens respiratory disease and kills silently over time.
The science here is not controversial. The bodies are real.
Yet under this administration, the EPA plans to stop counting the health benefits of reducing two of the deadliest air pollutants when regulating industry. For forty years, Republican and Democratic administrations argued over how much a human life was “worth” in cost-benefit analyses.
No administration—until now—set that value to zero.
Zero.
We Have Been Here Before. And We Refused to Learn.
Will we ever learn?
We still do not know the true number of people who died during the pandemic. We never will. Those deaths were also abstracted, minimized, redefined, and ultimately normalized in the name of economic “necessity.”
This is the same logic.
Profit over people.
Get rich or die trying.
Except now it’s literal.
This regime does not merely step over corpses—it walks over them deliberately, eyes fixed on quarterly earnings and donor balance sheets, chasing every last dollar while calling it “freedom.”
Climate change does not pause.
Pollution does not negotiate.
Lungs do not care about ideology.
And history will not forget that, at a moment when facts were available, lives were measurable, and alternatives existed, the United States chose to count human life as expendable.
Good luck.
And good night.
yours truly,
Adaptation-Guide
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