Heat-Seeking Sear-Suckers

When temperatures in British Columbia hit 121 ℉, 118 ℉ in Portland and 110 ℉ for days on end, as even Europe is also beginning to experience unprecedented heat, you’d think our Congress might actually sit up and take notice. But the mere thought of having to tax billionaires, even lowly multi-millionaires, into an income-inequality-reducing rate that will not drop their standard of living an iota, was too reprehensible for the entirety of the Republican Senate contingent. Climate change investments were among those they targeted for paring in the President’s infrastructure proposal. Otherwise, they pledged a filibuster to freeze the effort… and it is still unclear that there are enough GOP Senators to overcome that threat even for the pared down proposal.

Facing a recovering economy and a reasonably successful COVID containment effort now credited to the Biden administration, the Republican Party is mired in a conflict among duty to country, their party’s survival and their dramatic choice of support of Trumpist populism to placate their dwindling base. Choosing instead to draw their political lines in the sand over culture wars – truth has become an expendable inconvenience – and excluding minority voters against their incumbency, they see the existential threat only to their political power. The do not seem to care about their own existential threat to democracy… or even to the habitability of the planet itself.

Even if Americans were willing to sacrifice democracy, a looming possibility if voting rights can be sufficiently distorted, are we truly willing to sacrifice a habitable planet? Some evangelicals point to their perception of a biblical pledge from on high, following the Great Flood in the Old Testament times of Noah, that God would never again punish the earth with another such massive natural disaster. Surely, God would not allow global warming to wreak that level of massive natural destruction. What we are experiencing, many believe, is simply a cycle that will soon reverse. After all, they also believe with their interpretation of several biblical quotes, that God gave mankind unbridled freedom to exploit the earth’s resources. So, man did not cause the problem.

Those interpretations fall very much in line with business and industrial interests, from power generation to agribusiness to manufacturing, that to maximize profitability it is necessary to contain efforts to force those sectors to pay for the consequences of their release of pollutants and greenhouse gasses or to limit and stop allowing such toxic corporate practices in their entirety. They call those policy efforts “job killers” to garner sufficient ordinary voter fear to rally to their cause. That there are more jobs in the offing to upgrade and solve those existential environmental problems than would be lost is a concept simply swept under the carpet with a pledge that we do not have to change our work priorities to accommodate “woke” environmental concerns.

And since the most obvious arenas to tax are those where accumulations of wealth and revenue reside, any otherwise obvious governmental investments and policies to contain and reverse climate change, those mega-wealthy constituencies have spared no expense to support GOP anti-regulatory and anti-tax increase platforms at all costs. Thank you, Citizens United vs FEC. 

The problem, unfortunately, Mother Nature, still applying the most basic laws of physics, simply does not care that rich people and corporations or even poor farmers burning their fields at the end of growing season, do not want to change. Or that it is too great a burden to worry about, and unless everybody on the planet gets on board, there is nothing that is going to change the inevitable anyway. In fact, poorer nations are quick to point out that the richest lands got that way by wealth building during the industrial revolution, which formed the basis for all notions of man-induced global climate change. So, the burden has to be on those richest nations to fix the problem and pay to elevate the quality of living in the poorer countries. 

But we are on the edge of “too late.” If anything, the uniformity of the dire warnings of virtually the entire scientific community, the clear roiling evidence of horrific increases in climate-related natural disasters occurring with greater intensity and frequency notwithstanding, political sentiments often decry such admonitions as excessive. Writing for the July 7th BBC.com,  BBC environmental analyst Roger Harrabin tells us. “Climatologists are nervous of being accused of alarmism - but many have been frankly alarmed for some time now.

“‘The extreme nature of the record, along with others, is a cause for real concern,’ says veteran scientist Professor Sir Brian Hoskins. ‘What the climate models project for the future is what we would get if we are lucky. The models' behaviour may be too conservative.’… In other words, in some places it's likely to be even worse than predicted… Scientists are now striving to predict some of these crazy weather events that are currently taking policy-makers by surprise…Meanwhile, temperatures keep rising and shifting scientific goalposts. What's more, Canada's extreme extreme (sic) was cranked up by a global temperature rise of just 1.2C [2.16 ℉] so far on pre-industrial levels.

“But the world is probably heading for 1.5C [2.7 ℉] of heating early next decade, and temperatures will push onwards to 2C [3.6 ℉] and above unless policies radically change. What do we imagine things will be like with a rise of 2C, which was until recently considered to be a relatively ‘safe’ level of change?

“Baroness Worthington, a lead author on the UK's Climate Change Act, told me: ‘Concerned scientists are no longer concerned - they are freaked out… They're worrying there might not be a 'safe landing' on the climate. We are working on the idea of safe carbon budgets (the amount of carbon we can put into the atmosphere without badly disrupting the climate). But what if there is no safe carbon budget?... What if the 'safe' carbon budget is zero. We can't sugar-coat the potential realities of this.’” 

Death, disease, starvation, massive destruction, forced migration and conflicts over dwindling resources are nature’s responses to mankind’s “too little, too late” concerns. For conservative business interests unwilling to bear their cost burdens and change their ecologically disastrous patterns, they just might to assess the passionate concerns of rising younger voters around the world that since the greatest burdens of climate catastrophes will fall on them. They will, sooner or later, push those business and religious zealots off a cliff of their own making.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we can fix it, deal with it… or lose it.