Republicans Are Dead To The Planet; They're Fine With Trump's "Policies"; Move On Without Them
EDIT
There is indeed a shift underway among Republicans on climate change, but it’s not toward good-faith solutions. It’s a shift from snowball-wielding climate denial to a more insidious version that relies on complicity and delay.
Most GOP politicians might not be willing to call climate change a Chinese hoax, but they’re fine if Trump continues to do it. They’re also fine with anything Trump does to worsen climate change—whether it be dismantling greenhouse gas regulations or refusing to sign an international accord stating warming is a problem in the Arctic. They’re fine with keeping quiet in the face of major scientific reports, like the one released Monday saying that 1 million species now risk going extinct due to human activity. No wonder the CO2 Coalition, a group that falsely argues that carbon dioxide is good for humans, is expanding its presence on Capitol Hill: It sees a receptive audience.
It’s not that good-faith Republicans don’t exist on climate change. They do, and they always have. But they’re not growing at any meaningful rate. A recent study on the potential for climate policy reform found that “the current actors in the conservative environmental movement are not strong enough to make serious inroads at a national level.” That’s partly because Republican donors aren’t interested in funding climate policy groups. “Given this macro-funding environment,” the report reads, “there is little hope that there will be a change in the funder community.”
There is thus little hope that the Republican Party as a whole will propose serious climate change solutions in the near or even distant future. Given that there’s little more than a decade left to implement those solutions, there’s no reason to wait for them. If the increasingly dire reports, or the issue’s rising prominence among young voters, aren’t enough to sway Republicans, what will be? It’s time to stop treating the Republican Party as a potential partner in solving the climate crisis, and start seeing it as the immovable obstacle it’s always been.
EDIT/END
https://newrepublic.com/article/153844/republicans-dead-planet-earth