These past decades its been painful, in fact increasingly hideous, watching self-absorbed Republican/libertarian self-interest bulldozing ahead with their ruthless cynical campaign of malicious disinformation, all dedicated to out screaming legitimate and critical scientific information thus crippling public education about the global climate situation we are creating for our world (no one escapes).
It's as though the GOP leadership has been reduced to egomaniacal fools who possess no conception of the reality that humanity and society is utterly dependent on our biosphere's good health, which in turn is dependent on moderate global weather patterns, among other things such as constructive environmental stewardship.
A couple years back Joseph Romm Ph.D. wrote "The coming GOP civil war over climate change" an optimistic take on the struggle within the Republican Party between those who are committed to demonizing then ignoring serious science and their few remaining rational souls. Unfortunately it looks like the civil war is over and that the one time Grand Old Party has really and truly jumped down the poopshoot of reality denial in favor of a whole hearted embrace of their delusions of self-grandeur and being God's personal appointed agents of tribalism who defiantly see the greater world and anyone not in their clique as an enemy.
But, enough of my struggle to understand what's happening out there - this post is about sharing Joe Romm's recent article where he considers Senator Mitch McConnell's (Republican Majority Leader) commitment to destroying any and every effort to reducing fossil fuels consumption.
In Radical Shift, GOP Leaders Actively Embrace Catastrophic Climate Change
Over the past year, GOP leaders, driven by Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), have made a radical shift in the party’s public position on climate change. They are now actively seeking to destroy a global climate deal.
In any other universe this would be a major news story. ...
In fact, for most of the past quarter-century, most of the GOP leadership has at least given lip service to the idea that global warming is a global problem that needs a global solution. Not only have they abandoned that public position, but they now apparently believe the role of the “exceptional” and “indispensable” nation is to actively work to undermine the world’s best chance to save billions of people — including generations of Americans — from needless misery.
In its Monday piece, “GOP to attack climate pact at home and abroad,” Politico reports:
“Top Republican lawmakers are planning a wide-ranging offensive — including outreach to foreign officials by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office — to undermine President Barack Obama’s hopes of reaching an international climate change agreement that would cement his environmental legacy.”
Let’s set aside Politico’s ridiculous framing, whereby the purpose of Obama’s efforts to achieve a global climate treaty is strictly personal and political — to “cement his environmental legacy” — rather than what it in fact is, moral and science-based, to avert centuries of misery for billions of people. For Politico, such framing is a feature, not a bug.
What’s radical is the nakedly immoral and self-destructive greed underlying McConnell’s strategy, which includes one of his aides “informing foreign embassies about GOP plans to oppose Obama’s strategy on global warming.”
Consider that the Pope’s recent climate encyclical …
Later there's this tidbit:
Last November, the Obama administration leveraged the Clean Power Plan (CPP), which cuts carbon pollution from the electric utility sector, to get Xi Jinping to announce China’s game-changing commitment last year to peak CO2 emissions in 2030, “and to make best efforts to peak early.”
McConnell immediately complained he was “particularly distressed” by this deal because it supposedly “requires the Chinese to do nothing at all for 16 years.”
In fact, China had also pledged to double its carbon-free power capacity between 2015 to 2030, ...
As if to directly rebuke McConnell, two weeks later the Chinese announced that they would peak in coal consumption by 2020! By the spring it was clear that the Chinese would beat their coal and CO2 targets by several years.
McConnell apparently decided his crusade to persuade GOP governors to simply defy the new EPA standards and thereby block U.S. climate action wasn’t enough. …
… McConnell’s actions end the pretense that the GOP leadership has any interest whatsoever in trying to globally address the gravest preventable threat America faces. As Chait notes, ... without a peep of protest from within the party or the conservative movement — says everything you need to know about the party’s stance on climate change.” … (For the rest of Joe Romm's story link here)
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For more about Joseph Romm
October 10, 2012
Why Aren't Politicians Listening to Joe Romm About Climate Change?
For years, he's been arguing that talking about the science of warming is a winning political strategy. Now, new polling data are backing him up.
He's been called "America's fiercest climate blogger." And as a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a former Clinton administration official on clean energy, and an MIT-trained physicist, the subjects he covers are vast -- ranging from energy policy to the role of rhetoric in communications, as discussed in his new book Language Intelligence. But there's been a recurrent theme over the years at Joe Romm's popular blog Climate Progress -- the argument that political leaders, and perhaps most prominently President Obama, need to step up and explain to the public why global warming is such a dramatic threat to our livelihoods and future. …
Climate Desk: You've been writing for a long time about how climate is a winning political issue. So what first got you onto this? ...
