Climate Change Should Make the Republican Party Impossible

An illuminating, well articulated, and deeply
important article. — Molly

Chet Bundy stands in the kitchen of the trailer home he was in when Hurricane Michael passed through on October 20, 2018, in Panama City, Florida.

By Nicholas Powers

I watched Puerto Rican relief workers pull a shopping cart on ropes across a riverbed after Hurricane Maria destroyed the bridge. The food it carried kept families trapped on the hillside from starving. It was 2017. I drove along the island, shocked at the battered buildings and telephone wires spilled on the street and thought, we’ll need tons of money to rebuild.

As I flew back home, Texas was just recovering from Hurricane Harvey. A year later, Californian wildfires burned neighborhoods to ash, then Hurricane Michael smashed homes in Florida. Now, more fires on the West Coast have caused a quarter of a million people to flee, and hundreds are missing. Each new disaster adds to a growing crisis. Our nation’s survival means a new role for its citizens and a larger one for the federal government.

Climate change demands changes that conflict with Republican and even Democratic dogma. Ultimately, the nation’s survival may mean the GOP is impossible. “Big government” will be necessary. Populist solidarity will be, too. The poor and the working class, long divided by Republicans, may be forced by their shared vulnerability to climate change into a new coalition.

The End Is Here

In 2012, Hurricane Sandy scraped New York City like a giant Brillo pad. After it left, we walked outside and saw broken trees, and looked up and saw rooftops peeled and flapping. The phrase “climate change” had a new heaviness in our mouths.

Our amazement came from “seeing” it. Climate change is imperceptible until a narrative or an event makes it visible. It’s hard to “see” the carbon spewing from our cars and planes. It’s hard to “see” the methane seeping out of landfills or natural gas operations. However, even when it’s transparent, the air we breathe is already thick with too much carbon. Carbon levels are the highest they’ve been in 800,000 years. Our nation of 326 million is the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases, behind China. For decades, we vied for number one with the European Union. It means that in every breath of air we take, we inhale, unseen, our climate debt, and exhale a future of disaster.

Now, experience is teaching Americans that the end is here. Winters are eerily warm, hurricanes smash coastal cities and wildfires and droughts crack the land. Planes struggle to take off in the thin, hot air. Flights are rocked by more turbulence. In the West, the Rio Grande River dries to a muddy trickle. The Colorado River had a severe drought, too. Farmers stand in dry dirt fields and agonize over their crops.

The forecast for the next century is grim. Reports from Harvard and the National Climate Assessment describe a future that’s a Hollywood disaster film. Boiling heat waves kill the poor and old. Hot days and bright sun react with exhaust to create smog. In the Midwest, huge storms flood the land and devastate crops. Western wildfires incinerate homes as smoke fills people’s lungs with soot. Insects, soil erosion and water stress upset agriculture and leave store shelves empty. Ticks and mosquitoes carry new diseases into a warmer Northeast. Panic increases as the speed of climate change piles up on everyday life.

All Tomorrow’s Parties

Before Donald Trump was president, he tweeted that climate change was a Chinese hoax. Recently, he acknowledged, OK, maybe it wasn’t a hoax, but who knows if it’s human-made — and maybe, it will “go back.” Vice President Pence said the same thing.

Republicans faithfully parrot the fossil fuel companies that fund them. These include Koch Industries, Chevron Corporation and Marathon Petroleum Corporation. They include the mining companies or electric utilities. The brown energy industry pays for denialist research and funds the campaigns of whoever walks the party line.

Climate change denial was part of an overall ideology to justify the profiteering of Big Oil. Denialism may start to reach the end of its political usefulness as climate change increasingly upends our lives. While the recent storms in Texas and Florida failed to make climate change a major election issue this year, evidence is building that the piling up of disasters may shift voters’ opinions.

“I always thought climate change was a bunch of nonsense,” Margie White, a Trump supporter, told The Washington Post. “Now I really do think it is happening.” Hurricane Florence hurled a tree like a spear into her rooftop. Her neighbors are beginning to talk of global warming. They are the canary in the coal mine of future conservatism.

A deep chasm separates all US politicians — but most starkly the Republican Party — from the recommendations of climate scientists. Democrats are closer but their business-friendly regulations fall short of what’s needed. Even so, reality might force a day of reckoning for the Republican Party. The science is overwhelming. Millennials are panicked about their future. Corporate America beyond the fossil fuel industry is signaling it wants change. Voters like White see the writing on the wall. If so, the political center may shift and Republican voters may be forced to re-examine their knee-jerk fear of state-led efforts to regulate corporations and mitigate climate change.

Please continue this article here: https://truthout.org/articles/climate-change-should-make-the-republican-party-impossible/