GQP Balks At Infrastructure Spending That Could Help GQP Regions Now Choking On Smoke As West Burns

[hatrack]

This summer’s stormy weather—severe thunderstorms, tropical storms, and firestorms—has been the new normal for years. Seen-it-all New Yorkers take their chances wading through a cesspool at an entrance to a subway station. Boston usually averages a couple of inches of rain in July; this year, it’s eight inches after only three weeks. The Bootleg Fire in southern Oregon, the country’s largest wildfire so far, has spawned its own weather system capable of producing fire tornadoes, even as Western states confront a cataclysmic drought and heat waves.

Infrastructure building with resilience in mind is a deliberate strategy that has escaped congressional Republicans. States could put the $47 billion that President Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill allots toward resilience to work on fortifying their built environments—if the GOP stopped flapping their lips about bipartisanship and demonstrated a grasp of the concept by passing an infrastructure bill, instead of blocking one. Despite the Pentagon’s labeling of climate change as a national-security threat, despite Himalayan-high mounds of evidence and the deaths attributed to heat waves and other weather events, Republicans, and some Democrats, refuse to legislate in a way that matches the moment.

EDIT

What current Republican members of Congress don’t seem to recognize is that weather chews up and spits out roads, bridges, transit systems, and everything else in the built environment over the course of 30 to 100 years. In the age of climate change, assets well past their useful lifespan are more likely to break down.

EDIT

A bill passed under reconciliation rules requires just 51 votes, of course—that is, it requires no Republicans whatsoever. Further infrastructure funding might be unleashed by the INVEST in America surface transportation reauthorization bill passed by the House earlier this month—but that might require Republican support, which no sentient being would count upon. The GOP position on infrastructure spending is climate denial by another name. Just as their concern for human life has taken a back seat to their opposition to the president’s promotion of COVID-19 vaccination, Republican members of Congress also are unwilling to act to reduce the impacts from severe weather until their own constituents start suffering and dying. And maybe not even then.

EDIT/END

https://prospect.org/politics/republicans-play-a-deadly-game-on-climate/

[Mickju]

1. Republicans are killing all of us including themselves.

How bad does it need to get before they realize it?