Voltaire’s take on the ‘Utah Way’

Darci Stone holds a sign during the Stand Up For Science protest at the Utah State Capitol on the last day of the legislative session, Friday, March 7, 2025. (Photo by Alex Goodlett for Utah News Dispatch)

Perhaps the most eloquent summation of America in the age of Donald Trump comes from the famous quote of eighteenth-century French Enlightenment philosopher and acerbic social critic François-Marie Arouet, known by his pen name as Voltaire. He wrote, “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”

Trump has been dragging this country into a land littered with “absurdities” and non-reality since he rode down the escalator in 2015.  Now in his second term, teamed up with apex predator and wolf in DOGE clothing, Elon Musk, those absurdities are in full bloom as authoritarian, Nazi-saluting moral atrocities.

Public protests have sprung up throughout the country on almost every move Trump and Musk have made. One of the most important protest movements, but least publicized, is “Stand Up for Science.” I attended the rally in Salt Lake City on March 8 along with hundreds of other Utahns. But next time the attendance should be hundreds of thousands.

Two weeks ago, new director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, announced that EPA’s mission would be flipped on its head, i.e. it would no longer be to protect human life, public health and our air, water, and environment from contamination, but to “lower the cost of buying a car, heating a home and running a business.” Even from an economic standpoint this is an absurdity.

On average the economic benefits to EPA regulations established through the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act have been about 30 times the cost to industry of complying with those regulations.  Even the narrowest of interpretations of that equation finds a 3-to-1 benefit ratio. It is primarily thanks to EPA regulations on smoke stack and tail pipe emissions that Utah’s particulate pollution (PM2.5) has generally improved in the last 20 years (although that improvement is being eroded by more wildfire pollution).  A recent study from Utah scientists estimated that up to 8,000 Utahns die, and economic losses are up to $3.3 billion a year, due to current levels of pollution.

Voltaire would have cringed at Zeldin boasting the EPA will do its part to “power the great American comeback.” Comeback to what? More dead and sick Utahns and more economic losses?  Even if you assign no economic value to your own health, quality of life, or life expectancy, fossil fuel generated energy is now more expensive than clean energy.

On the EPA’s official website, Zeldin boasts, “We are driving a dagger through the heart of the climate change religion.” A MAGA cultist slandering the most important scientific reality in human history as a “religion” is right from the authoritarian play book: accuse your opposition of the very atrocities you’re committing.

Over 99.9% of climate research dating back to 1807, has confirmed an accelerating climate crisis from increasing atmospheric CO2.  It’s been declared the greatest public health threat of the 21^st century by the world’s top 200 medical journals. Even the oil industry’s scientists identified looming catastrophic global warming with “shocking skill and accuracy” as early the 1970s.  As we all know, the industry betrayed their own science, deciding that saving humanity would not interfere with quarterly profits.

That Musk promotes himself as a scientific genius while spearing heading some of the most anti-science delusions infecting the Trump Administration is particularly galling. Trump’s entire cabinet, their party’s Congressional majorities, and even some Democrats have for years personified the scientific absurdity and moral atrocity warned about by Voltaire.

For their part, our legislature keeps telling themselves that Utah is the best managed state in the nation. The 25,000-80,000 Utahns that died in the last decade from our air pollution might think otherwise. Our legislature is also disconnected from the wishes of their undead constituency, with their ongoing determination to wrest control of public lands away from the federal government, and to immunize Utah against mythical “federal regulatory overreach.” 

For example, Utah has spent your tax dollars fighting the “Good Neighbor Rule” which would have required reducing pollution from our coal power plants that send death and disease over to Colorado, as if those lives mean nothing. How does anyone square that moral failure with the Parable of the Good Samaritan whose virtue so many of our legislators hear extolled in their church services?

If Voltaire targeted his pen on the vaunted “Utah Way” in the era of Donald Trump, I’m pretty sure he would say, “Yup, nailed it.”