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| When the Taliban was out of power, Afghanistan had a surprisingly robust climate movement. This is from a demonstration in 2012 |
We are in a period of almost incomprehensible political drama—the debate, the assassination attempt, the scary veep. I haven’t agreed with Bernie Sanders about everything recently, but I think he was right when he told an interviewer Sunday that “politics should be kind of boring,” as in a “serious discussion of serious ideas as to how we address the serious problems facing this country.”
So as the Republicans gather in Milwaukee for their convention, let’s try and have that discussion. Which is a little hard because on key issues—in this case climate—the Republican platform says…nothing. Its platform doesn’t mention that we’ve just come through the hottest year in the last 125,000, it doesn’t mention fire or flood or drought. Instead, its short list (five) of “core threats to our very survival as a nation” it lists “crippling restrictions on American Energy Production,” and it promises
We will DRILL, BABY, DRILL and we will become Energy Independent, and even Dominant again. The United States has more liquid gold under our feet than any other Nation, and it’s not even close. The Republican Party will harness that potential to power our future.
In terms of specific promises, it makes only a couple (all with the odd random capitalization typical of Trump’s tweets): “terminating the Socialist Green New Deal” (which shouldn’t be hard, since it wasn’t ever enacted) and “streamline permitting, and end market-distorting restrictions on Oil, Natural Gas, and Coal.” Its short list of areas where it will champion innovation begins with “Crypto” (“We will defend the right to mine Bitcoin, and ensure every American has the right to self-custody of their Digital Assets, and transact free from Government Surveillance and Control”) and doesn’t mention renewable energy, which is by far the fastest-growing “innovation” on planet earth.
Indeed, if climate change is mentioned in Milwaukee at all this week, it will be only to scorn the whole idea. As the former president said at a recent Virginia rally, “Global warming is fine. In fact, I heard it was going to be very warm today. It’s fine.” So button it, all you scientists and other wackos. “The ocean will rise, maybe, and it may go down, also,” Trump added. “But it may rise one eighth of an inch in the next 497 years, they say, one eighth, which gives you a little bit more waterfront property if you’re lucky enough to own.”
The Democratic platform is, by contrast, sober and—well—responsibly and normally boring, in the tradition of party platforms. It says things like:
Going forward, Democrats will keep working to incentivize investment in transmission upgrades and new lines, and in the grid-component manufacturing that’s needed to support that growth. We will improve and speed up the processes of environmental review and clean-energy permitting; and further scale up development of clean energy on public lands.
And this, from the press release the
Democrats will scale up solar, wind, and geothermal projects made possible by the Inflation Reduction Act and invest in clean energy R&D to build America’s legacy as a nation of new frontiers and possibilities. President Biden will expand the clean energy workforce, with a goal of tripling the size of the American Climate Corps by the end of this decade and making sure the clean energy and manufacturing jobs of tomorrow are open and accessible to communities that have been too often left out in the past. We’ll also eliminate tens of billions of dollars in unfair oil and gas subsidies and hold oil and gas executives accountable for potential collusion or price gouging. We will continue to implement the president’s Executive Order on Environmental Justice for all.
This is straightforward and reasonable. Biden—who, it must be said, has seen the US pumping more oil and gas than every other country, and every other time—has also cleared the ground for a transition to renewable energy; the IRA has moved us toward that goal faster than most thought possible. Given four more years the momentum will be irreversible—which is precisely why the fossil fuel industry is piling in behind Trump. They know that this is their last chance to slow the solar and wind train, and buy themselves an extra decade or two of high-profit relevance. As Texas A&M professor Andrew Dessler told the Times,
“Their No. 1 agenda is to continue producing fossil fuels,” said Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences and the director of the Texas Center for Climate Studies at Texas A&M University. “Once you understand their main goal is to entrench fossil fuels regardless of anything else, everything makes sense.”
In some ways, the most apt comparison of GOP policy is not with the Democrats—its with the rest of the world. Like, all the world. The Washington Post’s Rick Noack has a poignant story this week on the efforts of the Taliban to deal with the devastation wrought by climate change on Afghanistan. I am no fan of the Taliban—between denying young women the chance to go to school and blowing up the Buddha statues at Bamiyan, they’d lost me even before 9/11. But on climate change they’re striving to be part of the normal world
While Taliban beliefs are rooted in centuries-old Pashtun culture and an extreme interpretation of Islam, the government affirms that climate change is real, that it’s destroying God’s work and that those in the world who reject the truth of climate change need to get on board. The Taliban has asked imams in Afghanistan’s tens of thousands of mosques to emphasize during Friday prayers the need for environmental protection.
Carbon footprints will weigh heavily on judgment day, said Kabul-based imam Farisullah Azhari. “God will ask: How did you make your money? And then he will ask: How much suffering did you cause in the process?” he said in an interview.
Lots of suffering, as it turns out. As the Post reports, “with parched deserts and deforested, flood-prone valleys, Afghanistan is deemed by researchers to be among the 10 countries most vulnerable to climate change. Hundreds of people died, for instance, during recent flash floods that officials blamed on ominous changes in the climate.” It’s not their fault, and they know that too. “Just like they invaded our country, they’ve invaded our climate,” Lutfullah Khairkhwa, the Taliban’s deputy higher education minister, said in his opening speech at a Jalalabad climate conference. “We must defend our climate, our water, our soil to the same extent we defend ourselves against invasions.”
But of course that’s impossible—there’s now way to head off high pressure systems and scorching heatwaves. The only hope is international cooperation—something the Taliban prevents with its human rights record, and something the Trump regime will prevent by once again pulling us out of the Paris accords. When that happens, the U.S.—biggest contributor by far to the stock of atmospheric gases now warming the planet—will be the only nation on earth not taking part in the effort to rein in the warming. Which would be…Not Boring.
Please go here for the original article: https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/the-gop-climate-plan-isway-worse
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