Timothy Montales

As Mar-a-Lago can be partly submerged for most of the year, the fact that its owner President Donald Trump denies climate change has raised plenty of eyebrows.

However, if President Trump wants to seek flood insurance for his “Winter White House,” a new bill introduced in Congress by Earl Blumenauer may deny him.

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The PARIS Act, if passed, will deny President Trump-owned properties of access to the federally subsidized National Flood Insurance Program, according to an IFLScience article.

“Congressman Earl Blumenauer today will introduce legislation to ensure Donald Trump has a stake in the catastrophic consequences of ignoring climate science,” an official statement by Blumenauer’s press office explains.

PARIS has been rumoured to be an acronym for Prohibiting Aid for Recipients Ignoring Science.

Blumenauer is recommending that one could not publicly dismiss the science behind climate change and establish walls and coastal defuses around beachfront properties to protect them when they are threatened with increasingly potent hurricanes, storm surges and sea level rise, and then expect the American taxpayers to foot the bill.

The bill is unlikely to pass through a Republican-controlled House, so it is likely that it will not graduate from an introductory stage. Blumenauer knows the situation; hence his aim, it seems, in announcing the PARIS Act is to make a political point more than anything else.


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