Why Are Republicans the Only Climate-Science-Denying Party in the World?

[applegrove]

Why Are Republicans the Only Climate-Science-Denying Party in the World?

By Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/09/whys-gop-only-science-denying-party-on-earth.html#

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Nor can a fealty to free-market theory alone explain the change, either. Free-market ideology traditionally recognizes a role for government when it comes to “externalities,” or actions that impose costs on others. Pollution is the most classic case of an externality — a factory whose production pollutes the air, or a local stream, should have to pay the cost. Even F.A. Hayek, in the anti-statist polemic The Road to Serfdom, conceded, “Nor can certain harmful effects of deforestation, or of some methods of farming, or of the smoke and noise of factories, be confined to the owner of the property in question or to those who are willing to submit to the damage for an agreed compensation. In such instances we must find some substitute for the regulation by the price mechanism.” Now, Hayek offered this concession to the role of government in the course of advocating for a pricing mechanism for externalities, rather than a crude ban. But he was recognizing that even the purest libertarians must concede the need for collective action of some kind when it comes to things like pollution.

It is also worth noting that the Republican Party used to fit in with the pattern of other international conservative parties. The Nixon administration created the Environmental Protection Agency and passed the Clean Air Act. The first Bush administration passed amendments strengthening it. Both of those presidents are considered, correctly, to be aliens to the conservative movement. The conservative movement has always opposed environmental regulation, and Republican leaders since the first President Bush — the GOP Congress since the era of Newt Gingrich, George W. Bush, and the current Republican presidential field — have followed conservative thinking. Indeed, administrators of the EPA from previous Republican administrations have endorsed Obama’s climate program, but they lack any influence or even legitimacy within the party today.

Rabid opposition is not the only quality that sets the GOP apart from other major conservative parties. The fervent commitment to supply-side economics is also an almost uniquely American idea. The GOP is the only major democratic party in the world that opposes the principle of universal health insurance. The virulence of anti-government ideology in the United States has no parallel anywhere in the world.

And so the “moderate” Republican climate position is that action is pointless, since countries like China will never reduce their own emissions. (No evidence of Chinese behavior seems capable of altering this conviction, which serves the handy function of justifying the desired conservative outcome without leaning too heavily on anti-science kookery.) The more right-wing position within the party — endorsed by the party’s leading presidential candidate and the chairmen of the science committees in both houses — is that thousands of climate scientists worldwide have secretly coordinated a massive hoax. And then the even more conservative position, advocated by the second-leading candidate in the polls, holds not only that climate science is a massive hoax, but so are evolution and the big bang. The “moderate” candidates are still, by international standards, rabid extremists. It is the nature of long-standing arrangements to dull our sense of the peculiar, to make the bizarre seem ordinary. From a global standpoint, the entire Republican Party has lost its collective mind.




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[Trajan]

1. Because it's not about science ...

Its about theology and/or wealth ...

[pampango]

2. There's money in that there denial. If profit is your only goal, the environment is not your friend.

[OffWithTheirHeads]

3. They celibrate willful ignorece as a virtue. At least in their followers.

Only the willfully ignorant could vote for republikkklans

[Omaha Steve]

4. 1%ers aren't scientists

Trickle down environmentalists.

[Jester Messiah]

5. They're a tribe of chest-beating macho idiots

Showing "weakness" diminishes their standing among their tribemates, so they can never do things like admit they were wrong, accept new evidence (might mean they didn't know everything to begin with), compromise, or seek solutions other than clubbing the other party over the head.

[Puzzledtraveller]

6. It's not only republicans

but mostly.

[kairos12]

7. No-nothings by design hate anything beyond spelling kat.

[Javaman]

8. the contrarian party. nt

[meow2u3]

9. Republicans work for the Koch Bros. and the fossil fuel industry

The Kochs won't do business with anyone who doesn't swallow their pack of climate science denying lies whole. The GOP knows deep down that people are causing the earth as a whole to heat up, but are paid a pretty penny in campaign contributions/legalized bribes to deny the reality.

I can safely bet that once the dirty fossil fuel money stops rolling in, the politicians on the take will abruptly and radically change their position on climate science.