NOT EVERYTHING IS TRUMP'S FAULT, PART LXXXVIII Read time: 5 minutes

 

Monday, July 31, 2023

NOT EVERYTHING IS TRUMP'S FAULT, PART LXXXVIII

CNN's Ella Nilsen tells us that some Republicans now understand the seriousness of climate change and the need to address it, but they can't actually do anything because of one person:

Deadly heatwaves are baking the US. Scientists just reported that July will be the hottest month on record. And now, after years of skepticism and denial in the GOP ranks, a small number of Republicans are urging their party to get proactive on the climate crisis.

But the GOP is stuck in a climate bind – and likely will be for the next four years, in large part because they’re still living in the shadow of former president and 2024 Republican frontrunner Donald Trump.

Even as more Republican politicians are joining the consensus that climate change is real and caused by humans, Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric has driven the party to the right on climate and extreme weather. Trump has called the extremely settled science of climate change a “hoax” and more recently suggested that the impacts of it “may affect us in 300 years.”

It's this argument again: The GOP is a reasonable party that's been mesmerized by a madman. All we have to do is break his spell and everything will be normal. Sorry, but no.

Judging from her LinkedIn, Nilsen is in her early thirties -- but she still should know that the Republican Party has been denying the seriousness of the climate threat for decades. She does refer to "years of skepticism and denial in the GOP ranks," but she also says that "Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric has driven the party to the right" on climate. But the party has been far right on climate for decades.

In the 1992 presidential campaign, George H.W. Bush referred to the Democratic vice presidential nominee, Al Gore, as "Ozone Man." George W. Bush beat Gore for the presidency in 2000 and subsequently

scorned the Kyoto agreement on global warming ... neutered the Environmental Protection Agency [and] filled his Administration with people like Philip A. Cooney, who, in 2001, left the American Petroleum Institute, the umbrella lobby for the oil industry, to become chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, where he repeatedly edited government documents so as to question the link between fuel emissions and climate change.

The 2008 GOP platform said:

Republicans caution against the doomsday climate change scenarios peddled by the aficionados of centralized command-and-control government. We can — and should — address the risk of climate change based on sound science without succumbing to the no-growth radicalism that treats climate questions as dogma rather than as situations to be managed responsibly.

A robust economy will be essential to dealing with the risk of climate change, and we will insist on reasonable policies that do not force Americans to sacrifice their way of life or trim their hopes and dreams for their children.

(Translation: Drill, baby, drill!)

Nilsen quotes a Republican who's Very Concerned about climate change:

“As Donald Trump is the near presumptive nominee of our party in 2024, it’s going to be very hard for a party to adopt a climate-sensitive policy,” Sen. Mitt Romney, a Republican from Utah, told CNN. “But Donald Trump’s not going to be around forever.”

So what did the GOP platform say about climate in 2012, when Romney ran for president against the incumbent, Barack Obama?

The current Administration's most recent National Security Strategy reflects the extreme elements in its liberal domestic coalition.... [T]he strategy subordinates our national security interests to environmental, energy, and international health issues, and elevates "climate change" to the level of a "severe threat" equivalent to foreign aggression. The word "climate," in fact, appears in the current President's strategy more often than Al Qaeda, nuclear proliferation, radical Islam, or weapons of mass destruction.

In his acceptance speech at the 2012 Republican convention, Romney said:

President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. MY promise...is to help you and your family.

What if Trump weren't the front-runner this year? Would the GOP be magically transformed into a climate-aware party? What does the #2 candidate in the race have to say about the climate?

“What I’ve found is, people when they start talking about things like global warming, they typically use that as a pretext to do a bunch of left-wing things that they would want to do anyways. We’re not doing any left-wing stuff,” [Ron] DeSantis said....

“Be very careful of people trying to smuggle in their ideology. They say they support our coastline, or they say they support, you know, some, you know, difference, our water, environment. And maybe they do, but they’re also trying to do a lot of other things,” DeSantis said, without elaborating on the alleged “other things.”

Also:

While governor, DeSantis has adopted bills banning Florida’s cities from adopting 100% clean energy goals and barred the state’s pension fund from making investment decisions that consider the climate crisis due to what he called a corporate attempt to “impose an ideological agenda on the American people”. He has also attacked the US military for being “woke” for warning about the national security risks posed by climate impacts.

What about that nice Tim Scott?

... he has opposed most policies that would curb carbon dioxide emissions. During the Obama administration, Mr. Scott challenged a regulation that would have required utilities to move away from coal and adopt wind, solar and other renewable power. During the Trump administration, he argued for dumping the Paris Agreement. And last year, he voted against President Biden’s expansive climate and health legislation that will invest about $370 billion in spending and tax credits over 10 years into clean energy technologies.

How about that young up-and-comer, Vivek Ramaswamy? He said this to Fox's Maria Bartiromo in March:

... we've shot our own fossil fuel industry in the foot, and it is because of this climate religion, but the dirty little secret, Maria, that not a lot of people know is the climate religion actually has nothing to do with the climate. It is all about power, control, dominion and apologizing for America's own success.

... What they really want to do is punish America and establish this agenda of global equity, which also allows China to catch up to us, and I think it's important we have a president who sees through that. Republicans dance around this issue a little bit too delicately. I say it expressly: we need to abandon climate religion in America. Yeah, that's the easiest step to unshackle our economy.

The Republican Party was hostile to action on climate change before Trump and it will be hostile to action on climate change after Trump. We can have a successful Republican Party or we can have a livable planet. There's no third option.