Republican priorities are — not “becoming,” because they always were — clear. Facing the one unequivocal existential threat to the American way of life (for starters) over the next century, here’s the GOP response to the oncoming rush of human-caused global warming:
The new Republican Congress is headed for a clash with the White House over two ambitious Environmental Protection Agencyregulations that are the heart of President Obama’s climate change agenda.
Senator Mitch McConnell, the next majority leader, has already vowed to fight the rules, which could curb planet-warming carbon pollution but ultimately shut down coal-fired power plants in his native Kentucky. Mr. McConnell and other Republicans are, in the meantime, stepping up their demands that the president approve construction of the Keystone XL pipeline to carry petroleum from Canadian oil sands to refineries on the Gulf Coast.
At this point, Republicans do not have the votes to repeal the E.P.A. regulations, which will have far more impact on curbing carbon emissions than stopping the pipeline, but they say they will use their new powers to delay, defund and otherwise undermine them. Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, a prominent skeptic of climate change and the presumed new chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, is expected to open investigations into the E.P.A., call for cuts in its funding and delay the regulations as long as possible.
Just to update your scorecard, here’s what the latest IPCC report confirms is at stake:
i) Risk of death, injury, ill-health, or disrupted livelihoods in low-lying coastal zones and small island developing states and other small islands, due to storm surges, coastal flooding, and sea level rise.37 [RFC 1-5]
ii) Risk of severe ill-health and disrupted livelihoods for large urban populations due to inland flooding in some regions.38 [RFC 2 and 3]
iii) Systemic risks due to extreme weather events leading to breakdown of infrastructure networks and critical services such as electricity, water supply, and health and emergency services.39 [RFC 2-4]
iv) Risk of mortality and morbidity during periods of extreme heat, particularly for vulnerable urban populations and those working outdoors in urban or rural areas.40 [RFC 2 and 3]
v) Risk of food insecurity and the breakdown of food systems linked to warming, drought, flooding, and precipitation variability and extremes, particularly for poorer populations in urban and rural settings.41 [RFC 2-4]
vi) Risk of loss of rural livelihoods and income due to insufficient access to drinking and irrigation water and reduced agricultural productivity, particularly for farmers and pastoralists with minimal capital in semi-arid regions.42 [RFC 2 and 3]
vii) Risk of loss of marine and coastal ecosystems, biodiversity, and the ecosystem goods, functions, and services they provide for coastal livelihoods, especially for fishing communities in the tropics and the Arctic.43 [RFC 1, 2, and 4]
viii) Risk of loss of terrestrial and inland water ecosystems, biodiversity, and the ecosystem goods, functions, and services they provide for livelihoods.44 [RFC 1, 3, and 4]
Many key risks constitute particular challenges for the least developed countries and vulnerable communities, given their limited ability to cope.
In case those near-term consequences aren’t motivation enough, consider the IPCC’s view of the longer term:
Increasing magnitudes of warming increase the likelihood of severe, pervasive, and irreversible impacts. Some risks of climate change are considerable at 1 or 2°C above preindustrial levels (as shown in Assessment Box SPM.1). Global climate change risks are high to very high with global mean temperature increase of 4°C or more above preindustrial levels in all reasons for concern (Assessment Box SPM.1), and include severe and widespread impacts on unique and threatened systems, substantial species extinction, large risks to global and regional food security, and the combination of high temperature and humidity compromising normal human activities, including growing food or working outdoors in some areas for parts of the year (high confidence). The precise levels of climate change sufficient to trigger tipping points (thresholds for abrupt and irreversible change) remain uncertain, but the risk associated with crossing multiple tipping points in the earth system or in interlinked human and natural systems increases with rising temperature (medium confidence).
There is hope, or would be, given smart climate policy — really, almost any climate policy
The overall risks of climate change impacts can be reduced by limiting the rate and magnitude of climate change. Risks are reduced substantially under the assessed scenario with the lowest temperature projections (RCP2.6 – low emissions) compared to the highest temperature projections (RCP8.5 – high emissions), particularly in the second half of the 21st century (very high confidence). Reducing climate change can also reduce the scale of adaptation that might be required…
But, of course, such an approach — reducing the impact of climate change by controlling carbon emissions, while planning for a higher-carbon future — is precisely what the Republican party has vowed to block.
My son was born in 2000. in 2050, at the threshold of that second half of his century, he’ll face the world we make for him now. The Republican party is conspiring with their paymasters in ways that will make his world significantly worse than the one our parents’ generation left for us. Potentially — see Oreskes and Conway on this — it could be horrifically degraded, my son and his generation and their kids confronting catastrophic failures in the systems that make modern life go.
Obviously, this means that despite the wretched feelings that remain from last Tuesday’s debacle, we gotta keep fighting. We need the Presidency in 2016, and as much of the Senate as we can claw back — and, perhaps more important, all those local and regional governments in which it is possible to attempt global-warming policy jurisdiction by jurisdiction. A hard slog. But necessary.
At the same time, I do have one question: Why do Republicans hate their children so?
Image: Hieronymous Bosch, Hell (the world before the flood) — panel from the Fall of the Rebel Angels triptych,
gogol's wife
Your question is unanswerable. They worship money, and I guess they assume that if their kids have enough money they’ll be invulnerable.
Bobby B.
Playing the Bosch card is SO 16th Century. Breughel landscapes are useful too.
ruemara
Jesus will be saving them and theirs; your liberal communist ass will suffer, so there, duh.
Cervantes
On the one hand, they know their self-dealing policies amount to stealing from the future in a hundred thousand ways — and in this context thinking about children fills them with self-loathing — which then causes them to hate children out of pure resentment.
On the other hand it could just be that they hate children.
gogol's wife
@ruemara:
Do you think Mitch McConnell believes in Jesus? I don’t.
kindness
Do us one thing Tom. Teach your kid to vote every election.
Seems as if all too many didn’t learn that one.
Mike J
Didja see the hed in WSJ about net neut today? “Obama vs. Internet: Pressuring the FCC to exert political control over the Web”
Tom Levenson
@Mike J: If there’s a less innovative industry than US cable operators….
Tom Levenson
@kindness: I do. He will. He knows he gets disinherited if he doesn’t. He’ll have his first opportunity at the next mid terms.
BR
Well, here’s hoping peak oil keeps warming to 4 degrees C this century rather than 6 degrees C. I think it will, but that also means that we’ll be facing a decline of industrial society at the same time as we’re dealing with moderately bad climate effects; I think that’s preferable to facing a 6 degrees C warmed world.
Belafon
It’s what the majority of the American people wanted, those who voted for Republicans and those who didn’t vote against Republicans.
scav
Carbon and all those gasses don’t have scary beards, turbans and come from Africa or Guatamala loaded with viruses of mysterious pre-election powers of magical contagion in their thighs next to the drug stashes. Or something. Something along the lines of does planning for these events inconvenience them personally or those other folk? I was really waiting for the pushback to mandatory quarentine when some bigwig oil execs etc got caught in the theater in airports instead of the disposable health-care (likely Obama-careenablers!) workers.
trollhattan
@gogol’s wife:
He believes in Coal Jesus.
srv
I think you liberals miss the upside. Mankind will evolve and be hardier, while the weak and the moochers will starve as nature intended them.
It seems Democrats all have a religious faith in evolution but think it’s a bad thing.
mzinformation
This is why Republicans are are who they are: ( Not that all these kids are Republicans but they are going to school in Texas)
http://ringoffireradio.com/2014/11/texas-college-students-dont-have-a-clue-about-who-won-the-civil-war-watch-this-check-your-gag-reflex-seriously/
Baud
@Tom Levenson:
WSJ editorial page writers?
Lurking Canadian
Prediction for 2050:
Rush Limbaugh, III: Well, follks, I’m sure you’ve all heard that it snowed twice as much this year in Anchorage as last. That’s right. Four inches of snow in a single year. But the libruls are still going on about global warming? Stupid libtards! It only snows when it’s cold!
NotMax
Well worth looking at the segment Maddow aired on Monday looking (briefly) at air pollution in China in advance of the coming summit. while the videos are astonishing, the unspoken fact of a populace seemingly docilely (perhaps willingly as well) accepting such conditions* is even more so.
*including runners in a marathon forced to wear respirators and having to be hosed down after finishing due to prolonged bare skin exposure to the air.
tsquared2001
“their new powers to delay, defund and otherwise undermine them”
Leadership – get some!
Motherfuckers win power and yet don’t want anything to do it.
NonyNony
@Lurking Canadian:
Not gonna happen – Limbaugh won’t have a kid.
Hungry Joe
I can only come up with one response to McConnell’s plan to eviscerate the EPA. Borrowed from the last line in THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI:
“Madness … madness!”
srv
3 Hours of Walking in NY as a Homosexual
chopper
@gogol’s wife:
depends on the jesus.
Gindy51
@Belafon: The majority of Americans did not vote at all. I think voting needs to be required or you get fined.
Glidwrith
@srv: You don’t need any religion to know evolution is real and, of course, it can be a very bad thing: to evolve means a selection of survivors best adapted to circumstances whose offspring survive. Case in point: people that survive Ebola. That is selection at work right there and is pretty damned horrific. Nature is a cruel bitch. I really don’t want to see the results of natural selection on my children, thank you very much.
Gindy51
@NotMax: It’s hard to protest when you can’t breath.
gene108
I remember 14-15 years ago the right-wing in this country had a big hard-on about getting us out of the U.N. I think Jesse Helms, when he took control of a Senate committee, in 1999, wanted to block our funding obligations for the U.N.
I do not think there’s any way to reason with right-wingers on this issue.
CaseyL
This is very likely going to be an issue where “private enterprise” – as well as the military, and the intelligence apparatus – are way ahead of Congress.
Institutions and industries whose existence depends upon rational evaluation of risk are working on addressing GCC, without Congress.
If Obama is going to govern by Executive Order from now on, he should sign a few mandating aggressive action against GCC.
japa21
Basic Republican mantra: Doing anything about climate change (if it existed, which it doesn’t, and if it did, it’s not man made but if it was, it would cost too much) will be costly and increase debt. We don’t want our children to bear the burden of that debt. Better they live in a world that is environmental hostile to them than have to deal with that amount of debt. See, we do care about our children.
Citizen_X
@mzinformation: Oy, that’s awful. But it’s Lubbock; it’s a dry stupid.
Hungry Joe
@trollhattan: Nobody fucks with the Jesus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZR58d77a4A
Citizen_X
@japa21: Financial debt–numbers in a balance sheet, following laws, regulations and customs that are always subject to change–is real. Environmental debt? Hippie/poindexter woo woo fantasy.
Punchy
The oceans are so fucked up already (pick one…acidification, pollution, warming, overfishing, dead zones, methane cathrates ready to pop, etc) that really, we’ve already screwed ourselves. Not sure many, if any, of those things can be reversed.
Glad I can’t live to be 200, cuz Earth in a couple hundo years is going to be a wasteland.
Roger Moore
A lot of them assume that the rapture will happen long before the worst consequences of global warming are on us. I suspect that another group see global warming as part of the end times and are actively encouraging it in order to get there faster. Threats about the future are not very effective against people who don’t believe that there is much future to worry about.
gogol's wife
@Hungry Joe:
Spoken by my favorite actor, James Donald.
samiam
The reality is that simple economics will do more to reduce climate change than any number of idiot Republicans fighting to oppose regulations.
Solar and wind are reaching economic parity with coal. Many old coal plants are being shut down and many planned new ones are being cancelled. In this case the fight will be won by doing nothing. Something the recent election has shown that Dems/Progressives are VERY good at!
Speaking of which…doesn’t Cole supposedly work at a College? Why wasn’t he volunteering to register voters rather than coming home to his pets and pissing/moaning on here about it?
rlrr
The future…
gogol's wife
@japa21:
That’s a mantra, all right, but do they really believe it? I doubt it. I think Tom is getting at something more mysterious to me: how do people like Mitch McConnell, who surely know better, square what they know to be the truth with their actions in dooming the earth for their descendants?
Joel Hanes
@srv:
It seems Democrats all have a religious faith in evolution
It seems that Republicans have no fucking idea how evolution actually works, nor understand that when half of all species go extinct, the chances are good that humanity will be one of them.
gogol's wife
@Roger Moore:
What percentage of the Republican leadership has any actual belief in the rapture?
Felonius Monk
Real ‘Muricans don’t give a shit.
ETA: And the ones that do, don’t bother to vote.
Face
@Punchy: Yes, but all that pollution will be diluted out when the polar ice caps melt, so there’s that.
rlrr
Why do Republicans hate their children so?
They all think they and their children will be living in their luxury high rises or gated communities while everyone else riots over Soylent Green rations.
rlrr
@NonyNony:
Not gonna happen – Limbaugh won’t have a kid.
Not unless science figures out a way to way for Dominican rent boys to get pregnant..
Gene108
@gogol’s wife:
Money and power are powerful drugs…
srv
@Joel Hanes: Humanity survived both the dinosaurs and the meteor, so there’s good evidence god is on their side.
MrChaz
@srv: Well I hope that’s sarcasm, because its wrong on so many levels. You think we can evolve to thrive in a polluted environment in 5-10 generations? Do you plan on having genetically engineered grandchildren? And when the Antarctic ice shelves and Greenland all melt and the ocean rises 30 feet by 2200 where will the tens (hundreds) of millions worldwide who are living within the soon to be flooded zone go?
Lastly, why should someone be able to pollute what I breathe? Especially since alternative technologies exist that would reduce or even eliminate the need for such power production.
Leave the world better than you found it, please.
Amir Khalid
@srv:
The meteor strike that killed the dinosaurs happened tens of millions of years before mankind evolved from the little mammals that survived it.
Waynski
@Gindy51:
People who don’t vote are either lazy, stupid, selfish, apathetic or all of the above. Which party do you think that would benefit? If they’re too lazy to vote; they’re too lazy to read and research issues. All they will hear is that the Republicans want to cut their taxes. If you don’t care enough to understand the issues and make a thoughtful decision, I don’t want you voting. That way be Idiocracy, as if we’re not halfway there right now.
Cervantes
@srv:
And what if humanity did not actually survive either the dinosaurs or the meteor?
What would that say about “god”?
MrChaz
@srv: Alright that’s funny, did you see humans riding dinosaurs at the Ken Ham museum? Since we have to cram a lot of action into a short time frame to fit everything in in 6000 years, humans must have ridden them right?
NCSteve
I totally get why people under 30 didn’t think there was anything of any significance to them and their lives at stake last Tuesday.
Roger Moore
@gogol’s wife:
I don’t know, but I’m willing to bet it’s substantially more than 0%. The percentage is very likely higher among the base, and even leaders who don’t believe themselves need to respond to that. My guess is that this is one of those cases where there are multiple interests pushing them in the same direction, and the combination is much stronger than the individuals.
NonyNony
@Amir Khalid:
I’m pretty sure that srv is giving the Republican point of view, not his/her own.
I could be wrong though – srv says a lot of stupid things that I usually chalk up to sarcasm. Could also be Poe’s Law in action.
Joel Hanes
I opined that Republicans know nothing about evolution.
@srv:
Humanity survived both the dinosaurs and the meteor,
I rest my case.
The human ancestor that survived the Chixclub impact 65 Mya was a small insectivore, probably something like a ground squirrel without the rodent teeth, probably an underground hibernator. Dinosaurs are still with us, and I look forward to roasting one on Thanksgiving — it looks like the few dinosaurs that survived Chixclub were small, feathered, and likewise burrowers.
The mammals that preceded it, that “survived the dinosaurs”, were even less humanlike.
Tenar Darell
@Tom Levenson
I don’t know if they hate their children as much as they hate change and view themselves as warriors against any change. I listen to the podcast You Are Not So Smart, and a few weeks ago Will Storr was interviewed. He mentioned his conversation with Lord Monckton from his book The Unpersuadables>/I>. Storr’s description of the conversation was a complete through the looking glass on steroids moment for me, very mind blowing. Also, dispiriting, because there is nothing in science or reasoned argument which can reach a person that far gone. For someone like Lord Monckton, an appeal to preservation of patrimony might be the best case scenario for getting through to him. Mostly, I think it convinced me that it would be better to focus on persuading the persuadable.
JGabriel
NYTimes via Tom Levenson @ Top:
I don’t know why terrorists keep putting their lives in danger to damage or dismantle the US. It seems like it would be much more efficient with much less personal mortality if they just donated to the GOP.
Of course, with all the dark money in the last election, maybe terrorists did donate to the Republican Party and/or its conservative “public interest” groups. How would we know they didn’t?
Another Holocene Human
@Mike J: Why he couldn’t have done this a month before the election … I know there were comment deadlines, but picking a fight on this issue could have gotten some young people to the polls.
Of course I’m hearing the dems raised “more money than ever” and had to be silent on some topics to please their donors.
In other words they were bought off by corporate interests in order to lose. Corporate interests don’t care.
Where is DSW’s head on a pike? (One of her cohorts lost a seat in South Florida. She should be laughed out of the party if nothing else!)
Another Holocene Human
@Tom Levenson:
I laughed at the bullshit on NPR overnight that industry gave in response to Obama’s comments. Basically that regulations will kill the internet even though net neutrality is close to the status quo and for all the tax dollars broadband “providers” have gobbled up we have pretty slow internet.
Another Holocene Human
As for climate change, TLDR.
The inconsistent voters that the Dems need aren’t high enough on the hierarchy of needs to worry about the climate. Nobody’s worrying about global mean temperatures when you’re struggling to make rent.
The environmental money came from some very wealthy people who are used to easily getting their way and ran up against Big Fossil Fuels money (Kochs, Chevron, BP, whatever). They dropped cash all over as stupidly as the Kochs did for very little result.
They didn’t have time or temperment to find out why or how someone would or wouldn’t vote their way, they just wrote a check.
And Rick Scott is still governor.
rikyrah
they would sell their own mother for a buck. they have no morality.
lurker dean
okay, this isn’t directly climate change related, but i loved mister levenson’s recent twitter posts about that idiot fournier. keep up the good work, tom :o)
ck
Guys, its time to wrap your minds around the idea that no one will do anything about climate change, ever. Every country in the world would have to make painful changes in their economy that while good in the ephemeral aggregate of things, will produce painful sacrifices in the right now. And that will always be an overriding disincentive to act. Sooo….theres that.
Jebediah, RBG
@NonyNony:
As I hear it, he’s already had a couple. Anyway, Rush Limbaugh III isn’t a biological child – it’s just a more human-sounding name for the Limbot 3000 that will be doing his show by then.
Tree With Water
Does Hillary Clinton oppose the Keystone pipeline? If so, has she made speeches condemning it?
Democrats should refuse to play act that such questions should be deferred until she “officially” announces. The stakes are too vast to play political charades.
schrodinger's cat
They are going to overreach, they always do.
schrodinger's cat
@Amir Khalid: srv is either trolling or imitating a troll. I can never decide which of those two is the case.
schrodinger's cat
Right wing is rising everywhere, here, in India and everywhere. The forces of darkness seems to be ascendant, that and the weather is giving me a major sads.
japa21
@Tree With Water: In 2010 she expressed an inclination toward approval.
Person of Choler
Great stuff, the Book of Revelation rewritten by the IPCC.
Tree With Water
@japa21: I did know that branch of the State Department that weighed in on it supported Keystone, while she was secretary. I ask because for all I know, she was proscribed altogether from influencing that conclusion. Under the changed circumstances, and because the republicans have already made clear it’s a priority to them, the rank and file have every right to expect Clinton to weigh in now, not later.
SRW1
That trolling by srv is getting pretty good. S/he’s being taken seriously.
Lawrence
Same reason they wreck the economy. ‘I’ll be gone. You’ll be gone’. They won’t be around to pick up the check. Complete sociopaths, wielding an army of religious lunatics, without whom they would never win an election.
Calouste
@ck:
If by “every country” you mean the US and maybe China, you’re right.
Germany for example has a target to produce 100% of its electricity with renewable energy by 2050, and is at the moment at 31%. They even produce more electricity with solar energy than the United States, even though there is a conspicuous absence of high sunshine deserts in Germany.
Zinsky
How blind do you have to be to not be able to see how much harm modern Republican ideology is causing or will cause?? Every item on their so-called agenda does harm to other human beings, from pushing the TPP, to denying climate change, to pushing the Keystone XL to destroying Obamacare. Everyone of those items is going to cause thousands, if not millions of other human beings to suffer. It’s clear that the Republicans agenda for the 21st Century is to repeal the 20th Century.
HelloRochester
Is it okay here to tell Rahm Emmanuel to eat a bag of salted dicks for disassembling Dean’s 50 State Strategy after taking credit for his victories in 2006?
cckids
@HelloRochester:
Not only is it ok, I think is is close to mandatory.
AxelFoley
@Another Holocene Human:
You really believe this one issue would have gotten young selfish dumbassess to the polls?