Global Warming Is Something Republicans Happily Lie About: They're Also Happy To Leverage The Chaos It Produces
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Although climate change has fallen out of political debates in the United States over the last few years, rising temperatures have been delivering destruction with muzzle velocity across the country. The Trump administration kicked off as wildfires in Los Angeles devastated homes from Malibu to Altadena. ICE agents prowling the streets of Southern California will find their balaclavas increasingly sweat-soaked as they contend with a brutal heat wave forecast to send temperatures into the triple digits. The National Weather Service is currently predicting severe thunderstorms across the mid-Atlantic and Great Plains, elevated fire risk in the West, and flash flooding in parts of Virginia and North Carolina, where workers are still picking up debris after Hurricane Helene destroyed the myth that Asheville would be a “climate haven.” Bang, bang, bang.
The climate crisis is every bit as disorienting as Bannon hoped the second Trump administration would be to its enemies, and those two crises complement one another. Republicans don’t have any real answers to climate-fueled destruction, of course; whether by way of Supreme Court rulings or the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the right is actively destroying what modest progress the U.S. has made toward reducing its emissions. For the GOP, climate-fueled disasters are just another source of chaos they can exploit to argue against the inefficiencies of government overreach and in favor of restoring law and order with boots on the ground. Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon are realizing their most ghoulish, transformative fantasies as the climate crisis their party has spent decades denying plays out in real time. Continuing to avoid the subject won’t help defeat them. But climate politics in the era of Trump 2.0 ought to abandon its reliance on feel-good, far-off promises and reckon with the actually existing nature of the climate crisis in the United States: a deadly, expensive mess being supercharged by the right.
Pressed on the matter, most White House officials and GOP politicians stick to the half-baked party line about global warming being not that bad or actually somehow good. But they probably don’t think about it that much. The drumbeat of intensifying floods, fires, and hurricanes aren’t material realities for people without loved ones living in temporary FEMA housing after a hurricane; friends who can’t afford to rebuild the homes they saved up for that were inundated by floodwaters; children who were swept away from their bunks at sleepaway camps that their parents sent them to so they could work through summer without needing to seek out expensive childcare. The officials and politicians will be fine. Their indifference isn’t a function of age so much as wealth. Plenty of old people are on the losing end of the climate crisis, and some of the country’s oldest politicians recognize that threat clearly. Trump and his ilk are simply too rich to experience the climate crisis as anything other than a brutally hot day on the golf course. Any attempts to address it are “Green New Scams.”
For more and more people in the United States, though, climate change is a kitchen table and/or life-and-death issue. Some of the old, future-oriented truisms about the way that crisis would play out are wearing thin. In rich, Western countries, climate activism has sometimes imagined global warming as a far-off threat to be remedied by the once-in-a-generation business opportunity promised by green technologies. Leveraging that innovation to cap warming at 1.5 or two degrees Celsius—the ostensible goal of the Paris climate agreement—would prevent the most catastrophic outcomes, the worst of which will be cruelly distributed in the places with the least responsibility for cranking up emissions. In the U.S., many argued, our aging politicians are simply too old to recognize the threat of climate change. Won’t anyone think of the children?
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https://newrepublic.com/article/197754/climate-disasters-cynical-republicans