Washington — 100 million Americans from Arizona to Boston have received thermal emergency alerts, and the western drought is approaching the Dust Bowl ratio. Britain has declared a climate emergency as temperatures exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit and parts of Europe are on fire.
But at Capitol Hill this week, Republicans warned against the behavior of the rash in response to the burning planet.
Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, said:
A Democrat, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin III, last week blocked what might have been the United States’ most widespread US response to climate change. But what was lost in criticism and pointing was the other side of the aisle. All 50 Republicans in the Senate have opposed decisive actions against the warming of the planet.
Currently, some Republicans in Congress have apparently dismissed the scientific evidence that human activity (burning oil, gas, and coal) produced gas that is dangerously heating the planet. Is almost nonexistent.
But for many, denying the cause of rising global temperatures argues that the solution, replacing fossil fuels with wind, solar energy, and other clean energy sources, will have a negative impact on the economy. It has been replaced.
In short, delay is a new negation.
Overwhelmingly, Capitol Hill Republicans say the United States should drill and burn more US oil, gas, and coal, and market power is somehow resolving carbon dioxide that is accumulating in the atmosphere. Develop measures and blankets around the sultry earth.
“I’m not in a position to talk about a solution, but it wouldn’t help the president to stop oil and gas production in the United States,” said Idaho Republican Senator Mike Klapo.
President Biden has not proposed to stop fossil fuel production. He wants to use tax deductions and other incentives to speed up the development of wind, solar and other low-carbon energies and make electric vehicles more affordable.
The fact that scientists say countries must reduce greenhouse gas emissions quickly, or the fact that global temperature rises reach catastrophic levels, has led many conservatives. It doesn’t look confusing.
In many respects, elected Republicans reflect the views of their voters. A Polling may be entrusted According to the Pew Research Center, 63% of Democrats cite climate change as a very big issue, while only 16% of Republicans feel the same.
Understand what happened to Biden’s national agenda
“Better buildback.” Before being elected president in 2020, Joseph R. Byden Jr. clarified his ambitious vision for the administration under the slogan “Build Back Better,” invested in clean energy, and raised spending made in the United States. I promised to be directed at the product.
“The Democratic Party has made climate change a religion, and the solution is strict,” said Graham, who embraces the science of global warming. He is one of the few Republicans to price carbon dioxide emissions and encourage industry to purify businesses.
However, Graham rejected Biden’s goal of halving U.S. emissions by 2030 and tried to keep global average temperature rise at 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels. did. Beyond that, scientists say the threshold is that the potential for catastrophic turmoil is greatly increased. The planet has already warmed up to about 1.1 degrees Celsius.
Graham said it would be foolish for the United States, the country that emitted the most carbon dioxide in history, to reduce pollution unless other large pollutants like China and India do the same. Repeated the common copy.
“The point for me is to get people involved, not just us,” he said.
So it went with the Republicans, where there is a catastrophe warning Mocking as an exaggeration, Techniques that do not exist on a viable scale, such as “carbon recovery and storage” and “clean call”, are welcomed as saviors. At the same time, wind power, solar power, electric vehicles, etc. were rejected as unreliable. Overly expensive.. America’s leadership in global affairs is seen as a fool’s errand, kneeling the domestic economy while Indian and Chinese coals bury American goodwill in soot.
“When China gets our good air, their bad air must move.” Herschel Walker, a former soccer star and now a Republican candidate for the Georgia Senate, explained last week... “So it moves into our good space. Next, we need to clean up that backup.”
The party’s political attacks point to Central American climate refugees gathering on the southern border, poor “forest management” with wildfires, and environmentalists who rob farmers of record droughts. Often concentrates on the symptoms of.
For decades, Republicans and the fossil fuel industry have denied the science of climate change. It began to change slowly as evidence of the Earth warming at an unprecedented rate became undeniable and began to sympathize with moderate and independent voters.
Last month, House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy published a conservative roadmap for addressing climate change. Parliamentarians have also launched the House Conservative Climate Caucus to discuss solutions that the Republicans can support.
However, McCarthy’s climate plan calls for increased fossil fuel production. And last Thursday, when the conservative climate Caucus met with executives to discuss climate change, the rally was dominated by more oil and gas drilling stories. Fossil fuel company executives have also criticized new federal regulations that require disclosure of business risks from global warming, according to Republican lawmakers who attended the meeting.
John Krosnick, a social psychologist at Stanford University, said: Now he said of Republicans, “they have to come up with other ways to delay.”
Republicans involved in this issue Senator James M. Inhof in 2015Republicans in Oklahoma brought snowballs to the Senate floor as evidence that global warming was a myth. Some Republicans personally admit that a bipartisan trip to see the glaciers melt in Greenland has solved the question of what’s happening on Earth.
Republicans have a series of step-by-step steps to pass if they win a majority in November. It is to encourage US investment in renewable energy and the restoration of forests and wetlands to absorb carbon dioxide. North Dakota Republican Senator Kevin Cramer and Louisiana Republican Bill Cassidy have proposed carbon tariffs on imports from fewer countries than the United States to stem climate change.
However, many of those same lawmakers reject the idea that climate change is an urgent threat.
If the Republicans win the House or Senate in the November midterm elections, “I think we can expect a much more aggressive approach to domestic energy production,” Kramer said this week. “It does not mean that we will abandon climate as part of the agenda, but that we will focus more on technologies that advance all forms of American energy.”
A Republican senator, Tom Tillis, North Carolina, called for a “reasonable transition” to clean energy on Tuesday. “We’re trying to move much faster than technology and the economy can absorb,” Democrats said.
Republicans say Biden, strongly pushed by uncompromising climate activists on the left, has taken the greatest approach to climate law inevitably.
“The far left has ruined this so badly that the Republicans may actually take the first real action on climate change,” said Benjamin Backer, chairman of the American Conservation Union, a central right-wing environmental group.
But even Republicans trying to deal with the effects of climate change in their own country seem to find it difficult to identify the root cause of the problem. Last week, three Utah Republicans, Senator Mitt Romney and Congressman Chris Stewart and Burgess Owens, shrank the Great Salt Lake before its dusty ruins choked the capital that shares its name. Proposed a law to save.
However, the proposals, including Army Corps of Engineers surveillance programs, ecosystem management, water redirection, canal strengthening, and “potential techniques” to combat drought, did not mention climate change. ..
The same was true of Mr McCarthy’s proceedings on Friday, saving the giant sequoia in his area from fire and drought.of Opinion piece he co-authored at TimeMcCarthy made a diagonal reference to “deteriorating drought conditions and extreme heat” without ever mentioning climate change, and “fire extinguishing and mistaking decades” of annual forest fires in his state. Informed policy “was blamed.
One of his co-authors, Congressman Scott Peters of California, helped draft the “Save Our Sequoia” bill, but did not explain why climate change was not mentioned in the timepiece. But he said. It is igniting a devastating wildfire in the southwest. He added the bill. “As far as I am concerned, they can tell the world that birthday cakes are starting these fires, as long as we have something sorry for the president’s desk.”
Republicans working on the undeniable reality of climate change still suffer from a philosophical aversion to intervention in energy markets. A total of $ 20 billion in federal tax deductions annually enjoyed by the fossil fuel industry and endorsed by Republicans and some Democrats is not said.
South Carolina Republican and founding member of the Conservative Climate Caucus, Congressman Nancy Mace, said she was aware of the essential policies to address climate change. But she called for tax deductions to guide consumers to “choose winners and losers” towards renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. She said Congress should simply cut taxes and let consumers and businesses decide how to spend the extra money.
“I personally want to buy an electric car, so let’s reduce everyone’s taxes so people can buy what they can’t buy otherwise,” she said.
In a conversation with Secretary of Transportation Pete Butigeg on Tuesday, Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Scott Perry said the price was $ 55,000, a price that most Americans couldn’t reach, even at the president’s suggestion. The government rejected the promotion of electric vehicles. $ 7,500 federal tax deduction for some vehicles. Butigeg replied Chevrolet Bolts cost $ 26,595, and electric pickup trucks such as the Chevrolet Silverado and Ford F150 Lightning start at around $ 39,000. He added that he bought a 15,000-mile used plug-in Ford C-Max hybrid for $ 14,000.
Former Republican lawmaker Bob Inglis, who lost the Primary in 2010, claimed that the party has made great strides since then, partly in support of climate change measures.
“We are confident that we will deal with climate change,” said Inglis. “It’s just whether you act fast enough to avoid the worst consequences.”