We’re having a heat wave, a tropical heat wave. Also a temperate heat wave and an arctic heat wave, with temperatures reaching over 30 degrees in northern Norway.
A mega-drought in the western United States has reduced Lake Mead to a tiny fraction of its former size, and now it threatens to become a “dry lake” unable to provide water for major cities.
Climate change is already causing immense damage, and it is probably only a matter of time before we experience massive catastrophes that will cost thousands of lives.
And the Republican majority on the Supreme Court has just voted to limit the Biden administration’s ability to do anything about it.
It says something about the state of politics in the United States that several environmental experts I follow were relieved by the decision, which was less comprehensive than they feared and still left the government with some possible avenues for climate action. Given our situation, I think that objectively bad decisions should be graded on a curve.
And in that sense I suspect that at least some of the Republican judges understood the enormity of what they were doing and tried to do as little as possible while maintaining partisan allegiance.
It is party loyalty that is at stake, of course.
Anyone who believes that the court’s recent series of rulings reflect any coherent legal theory is willfully being naive: clearly, the way this court interprets the law is almost entirely determined by what serves republican interests.
If states want to ban abortion, well, that’s their prerogative. If New York has a law that restricts the carrying of concealed firearms, why, it is unconstitutional.
And partisanship is the core problem of climate policy. Yes, Joe Manchin is getting in the way of advancing Biden’s climate agenda. But if there were a few Republican senators willing to support climate action, Manchin wouldn’t matter, and neither would the Supreme Court.
Simple legislation could establish regulations limiting greenhouse gas emissions, provide subsidies and perhaps even apply taxes to encourage the transition to a green economy. So, ultimately, our paralysis in the face of what increasingly looks like an imminent apocalypse comes down to the GOP’s resolute opposition to any kind of action.
The question is: how did letting the planet burn become republican dogma?
It wasn’t always like that. The Environmental Protection Agency, whose scope the court has just limited, was created by none other than Richard Nixon. Until 2008, John McCain, the Republican nominee for president, campaigned on the promise of imposing a system of limits on greenhouse gas emissions.
The Republican position on the environment is also completely different from that of mainstream conservative parties in other Western countries. A study — from a few years ago, but I don’t think the fundamentals have changed — found that most conservative parties support climate action and that the GOP “is an anomaly in denying anthropogenic climate change.”
And yes, the GOP remains in climate denial; he may sometimes admit that the change is real, while insisting that nothing can be done about it; but it goes back to denial every time there is a cold front.
So what explains the GOP difference? A natural response is “follow the money”: in the 2020 election cycle, the oil and gas industry gave 84% of its political contributions to Republicans; in coal mining, it was 96%.
But I suspect the money is only part of the story; in fact, to some extent, the causality may run the other way, with the fossil fuel industry supporting the Republicans because they are against the environment, not the other way around.
My skepticism about a story of simply following the money comes from a few observations. One is that Republicans have taken anti-science positions on other issues, such as Covid vaccination, where monetary considerations are much less obvious. As far as I know, the coronavirus is not a major source of campaign contributions.
Also, while the Republican position on climate is off the charts compared to that of “normal” conservative parties, it is actually typical of far-right populist parties. (Note: I hate to use the word “populist” here, because Republicans have no inclination for policies that would actually help workers. But I think we’re stuck with it.)
In other words, the politics of climate policy looks a lot like the politics of authoritarian governments and minority rights: the Republican Party looks more like Hungary’s Fidesz or Poland’s Law and Justice than center-right parties than other countries. call conservatives.
Why, exactly, are right-wing authoritarian parties against the environment? That’s a discussion for another day. What matters now is that the United States is the only major country in which an authoritarian right-wing party — which has lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections but controls the Supreme Court — has the ability to block actions that could prevent the climate catastrophe.
Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves
