The federally funded play about climate change that Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney scoffed at Tuesday as an example of the “crazy stuff” former President Barack Obama funded was used to preview the 2015 Paris climate change summit.
“The National Science Foundation last year used your taxpayer money to fund a climate change musical. Do you think that’s a waste of your money?” Mulvaney said to underscore the fact that the Trump administration is no longer pursuing Obama’s course on global warming.
The play was called “The Great Immensity.” It received about $700,000 in 2010 from the federally backed foundation. And one of its last showings was held in spring 2014 at the Public Theater in New York City by the theater troupe “The Citizens.”
Mulvaney used the play to point out that President Trump is “simply trying to get things back in order to where we can look at the folks that pay taxes and say look, we want to do some climate science but we aren’t going to do some of the crazy stuff that the previous administration did.”
The play was characterized as a “continent-hopping thriller” about a woman named Phyllis whose husband, Karl, disappears while on assignment for a nature show on a tropical island, according to a synopsis. In her search for him, Phyllis “uncovers a mysterious plot surrounding the upcoming international climate summit in Paris,” according to the Public Theater synopsis.
The thrill ride continues as the hours to the summit ticks down and Phyllis “must decipher the plan and possibly stop it in time.”
Mulvaney’s comments were well-timed, as Trump is mulling whether to remain a part of the agreement or withdraw entirely. Trump said he would make a decision after he returns from his meeting with the Group of Seven industrial nations in Sicily this weekend.
In many ways, the plot against Paris that Phyllis is looking to unravel in the play could be likened to the decision Trump is expected to make. However, many of the nearly 200 countries that are a part of the Paris deal have vowed to move forward in spite of what Trump decides to do.
“We shouldn’t give up because one of the family has decided it won’t walk with us,” Nazhat Shameem Khan, chief climate negotiator for the island nation of Fiji, said at a climate meeting in Bonn, Germany, last Friday. The meeting was held ahead of a major gathering later this year to decide the course of the Paris climate change accord.
“At this point in time the U.S. has not made that decision, and we don’t know what the decision is going to be and we hope very much that they will remain within the Paris agreement … but we will not stop our work even if the result is a negative one,” Khan said.
At this week’s upcoming G7 meeting, Trump is expected to hear from several countries on the U.S.’s fate in the climate agreement. Pope Francis raised the subject with Trump during the president’s meeting with the Catholic leader at the Vatican on Wednesday, giving Trump a copy of his 2015 encyclical on climate change.
