The GQP Silence In Face Of Climate Collapse Shows What They'd Do If Back In Power - Deny Everything
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Over the past few weeks, the climate news has gotten worse. Heat domes over the northwest U.S. and the western provinces of Canada killed hundreds of people, devastated wildlife populations on land and in sea, and created desert-like thermometer readings in regions more used to temperate rains and snows. In California, the Dixie Fire is now the state’s second-largest in history. Pollution from western fires is now making the air quality in locales such as Salt Lake City and Denver more dangerous to breathe than the air in New Delhi, which, in recent years, has regularly posted some of the worst air quality data on Earth. Another report suggested the Gulf Stream had now become unstable, and that its breakdown could lead to unprecedented climatic changes in the northern hemisphere. And news stories abounded of the Arctic polar air clogged with smoke from Siberia’s burning tundra.
In the United States, while President Joe Biden and his climate envoy John Kerry responded to the IPCC report by urging immediate action on climate change legislation — and climate activists insisted we must go above and beyond the Biden administration’s demands — Republican leadership, long skeptical of the science of global warming and loath to commit politically to the societal changes needed to get a handle on the cascading crisis, was largely silent in the face of this drumbeat of bad news.
That telling silence from GOP grandees was, perhaps, marginally better than the party’s response to an IPCC report in 2018 that detailed the differences between limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees as opposed to letting things rip and accepting two degrees or more of temperature increases. Back then, under President Trump, the party attempted to dismiss climate change as a hoax, and mitigation strategies as being too much of a drag on the economy. But, in a closely divided Congress, today’s GOP silence is almost as destructive as GOP climate change denialism, making it desperately difficult to pass legislation vital to helping the world to transition away from carbon-based economies. Moreover, even if Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy are staying silent on the IPCC report — and even if senators such as Marco Rubio now begrudgingly and belatedly accept that at least some of the causes of global warming involve human activity — a significant wing of the party, revolving around conspiracists such as Marjorie Taylor Greene, and far right senators such as Ted Cruz, is still firmly wedded to denialism.
Should the Republicans reclaim Congress in 2022 or the presidency in 2024, it’s a fair bet that they would, in short order, reinstate Trump’s anti-environmental policies, and once more put the pedal to the metal on approving new oil drilling leases and weakening fuel economy standards.
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https://truthout.org/articles/the-uk-is-exceeding-us-climate-action-but-thats-not-saying-much/
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