Trump’s magical thinking on climate change is just political smoke and mirrors 

Washington often indulges in magical thinking, as politicians conjure new budgetary gimmicks or announce ambitious goals without concrete plans to achieve them. The Trump administration’s latest hocus-pocus comes via a memo that effectively abandons the long-standing metric that quantifies the economic damages of climate change, known as the social cost of greenhouse gases (estimated in 2023 at about $210 per ton of carbon dioxide). With this memo, the administration is telling federal agencies...