What's in a name? Trump's Affordable Clean Energy plan uses almost exactly the same name as the UN's Sustainable Development Goal 8 and yet their impact and aims are diametrically opposed undp.org/content/undp/e…
And yet all the reporting, including ours (story coming soon, will now obediently repeat the word's 'Trump's Affordable Clean Energy plan', because that is what it is called and the people who make A Thing, get to name The Thing. That's how it works.
But the name is a lie. It is not clean in so much as it clearly allows States to defer action on emissions. It is arguably not affordable when you consider polluting externalities and the global transition towards lower cost renewables.
Hell, it looks like it is not even an energy plan given it seems to be solely focused on power and has nowt to say about heat.
And yet everyone will call it an Affordable Clean Energy plan, because that is what it is called. And Trump will parrot that line and the vast majority of people who will never look at the detail will believe the words mean what they mean, even though they don't.
The most powerful government in the world is operating with its own science, its own economics, and its own words, none of which bare any relation to the actual world and there seems to be nothing anyone can do about it.
Worst of all, even if media outlets with access call them out (which is a depressingly big if) and ask 'how can you classify this as clean' the response will be the normal unintelligible word soup from Trump or Sanders and then everyone will just move on to the next thing.
And it's hard to know what anyone can do about it. Should it be framed as the 'so-called affordable clean energy' plan? How can anyone quickly explain the detail when it takes in endangerment findings and states rights and energy market dynamics?
I know it is a case of 'get out the world's smallest violin', but reporting becomes really difficult when the people you are reporting on have no respect for truth and language and are happy to co-opt the media's commitment to accuracy and balance for their own propaganda ends.
