Lying About Climate Change Is What Makes a Good Republican
July 3-10, 2017, Issue
Lying About Climate Change Is What Makes a Good Republican
Yet instead of holding the Koch brothers’ lackeys to account, the media says the GOP’s murder-suicide policy can be chalked up in part to “Democratic hubris.”
By Eric AltermanTwitter
Today 6:00 am
Come take a nostalgic spin with me into the past—before, that is, James Comey’s dramatic testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee. I’m thinking of the day Donald Trump announced the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement. Boy, was that big news. The New York Times ran three articles about it above the fold. The story led the news broadcasts, cable programs, and Sunday shows, and it dominated social-media feeds for days.
Preserving the atmosphere interferes with the Koch brothers’ business plan. They’ll let their heirs worry about a poisoned planet.
Leave aside certain subtleties, like the fact that the withdrawal won’t take effect until November 4, 2020, which happens to be the day after our next presidential election. What was really new about this news? Given the attention lavished on Trump’s decision, an observer might imagine that addressing climate change had long been deemed a matter of crucial political importance. Think back to last year’s campaign: Remember all the coverage that the two candidates’ views on climate change and the Paris accord received?
Neither do I. Not a single question about climate change was asked of any presidential candidate by a moderator during the 2016 debates (or the 2012 debates, for that matter). Clinton did bring the subject up unbidden during one of them, when she noted, accurately, that Trump had repeatedly made and tweeted ridiculous accusations, such as that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” But neither the moderators at the debates nor the vast majority of pundits who graded the candidates’ performances thought this lunatic assertion worthy of further exploration.
When it comes to global warming, as on so many other issues, Trump is perfectly in sync with the Republican Party and out of sync with pretty much the entire educated world. No other major political party on the planet rejects the international scientific consensus that global warming is both caused by humans and poses a profound threat to civilization, including our own. Once upon a time, politicians like John McCain and Lindsey Graham dabbled in common sense on the issue, but they soon found that their national ambitions demanded a complete reversal. Now it’s almost impossible to find a Republican politician willing to put his or her career at risk by speaking the truth about climate change. Even supposedly sensible conservative pundits pledge fealty to this know-nothing, anti-science view. Anti-Trump conservative Erick Erickson is frequently lauded for his criticisms of the president. This American hero recently tweeted, “I just have a hard time believing climate change extremists when so many of them also believe boys can become girls.” And as I’ve noted, Bret Stephens is the latest recipient of the honor of a New York Times op-ed column, despite having dismissed human-caused global warming as a “mass hysteria phenomenon.”
No other major party on the planet rejects the scientific consensus that human-caused global warming is a threat to civilization.
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https://www.thenation.com/article/lying-about-climate-change-is-what-makes-a-good-republican/
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