Republican Climate Change Denial – Kicking the Can Down an Increasingly Dusty Road

   Lake Oroville California

    Lake Mead Nevada

It’s no secret that California is the preferred target for Republican attacks, even as it produces the majority of the nation’s vegetables, is America’s innovation/technology leader, has 13% of the nation’s population, would be the fifth largest global economy if it were a separate nation… and has even elected the Republican House Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy. According to Republicans, California is a socialist state heading for bankruptcy. Hard to explain our budget surplus to bigoted deaf ears. And yes, it’s a GOP attitude that may be focused on California but is also directed at blue states in need of disaster relief. There is irony, as damage from floods, hurricanes and tornados rises almost exponentially, that red states are now bearing a sizeable share of climate change damage.

I remember elected Republicans in Congress, after 2012 superstorm Sandy slammed into the US Northeast (that hurricane inflicted $70 billion in damage and killed 233 people across eight countries from the Caribbean to Canada), seriously considering denying FEMA aid to blue states. Recently, after California wildfires, Donald Trump claimed that state was to blame for those fires, even as California’s forest management policies mirrored those in neighboring federal forestland, which were equally destroyed.

Yet climate changes issues have been so linked to California, where water rationing is escalating in major cities, where farmers (the biggest consumers of water) cannot get enough to grow their most necessary crops, where rainfall is contracting, snow disappears from mountains earlier every year, and where lakes and reservoirs are at their lowest levels in recorded history. Even as California has its own local oil and gas reserves, right-wing fossil fuel producing states lead the cabal against both California and climate change itself. And yes, this is a fundamental GOP plank that does not exist in the Democratic Party.

According to AmericanProgess.org (March 20, 2021), “there are still 139 elected officials in the 117th Congress, including 109 representatives and 30 senators, who refuse to acknowledge the scientific evidence of human-caused climate change. All 139 of these climate-denying elected officials have made recent statements casting doubt on the clear, established scientific consensus that the world is warming—and that human activity is to blame. These same 139 climate-denying members have received more than $61 million in lifetime contributions from the coal, oil, and gas industries.

“While the number of climate deniers has shrunk by 11 members (from 150 to 139) since the CAP Action Fund’s analysis of the 116th Congress—largely in the face of growing and overwhelming public support for action on climate—their numbers still include the majority of the congressional Republican caucus.* These climate deniers comprise 52 percent of House Republicans; 60 percent of Senate Republicans; and more than one-quarter of the total number of elected officials in Congress. Furthermore, despite the decline in total overall deniers in Congress, a new concerning trend has emerged: Of the 69 freshmen representatives and senators elected to their respective offices in 2020, one-third deny the science of climate change, including 20 new House Republicans and three-of-four new Republican senators. Of note, no currently serving Democratic or independent elected officials have engaged in explicit climate denial by this analysis’ definition.” They’re killing us! We keep hearing about unprecedented “natural disasters,” most directly linked to climate change, but denial still prevents necessary solutions.

Times OpEd writer, LZ Granderson (May 5th) adds some caustic details of this rampant denial: “But what should be abundantly clear to everyone is that ever since Hurricane Katrina pummeled 90,000 square miles of the country — roughly equivalent to England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland combined, for those keeping score at home — when it comes to natural disasters, the ‘unprecedented’ has become the ‘more frequent.’

“When Katrina struck in 2005, I thought a productive conversation about climate change could be had. Clearly that was foolish. Each year since 2019, PBS has had to update its titleholder for ‘costliest year for weather and climate disasters since 1980.’ Thanks in large part to Hurricane Ida’s $75-billion price tag, last year was the third costliest on the list… [Republican climate change deniers, however,] are the people we are depending on to steer the Southwest through its driest period since Vikings roamed the seas.

“Anyone concerned?... Particularly among the 25 million people across three states and Mexico who rely on Lake Mead for water… The levels have dropped so low that the lake’s original intake valve from 1971 is now visible. In some ways, it’s fitting for the largest man-made reservoir in the country to be the scene where some of our transgressions are being spat back out in our faces.

“Not to be outdone by Mead, water levels at Lake Powell, the second-largest reservoir in the country, have dropped about 100 feet in three years. It is now just 32 feet away from not being able to produce electricity. New rules requiring many Californians to limit outdoor watering to one day a week may be just the opening act to this crisis… Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, said the biggest contributor to water use in the region isn’t urban growth but farming. You can’t get more ‘blue vs. red’ than that.

“Considering how willing many politicians were to gaslight voters about a deadly pandemic, I fear the damage that will come from a political landscape in which wooing climate deniers is part of the election strategy. Nearly 50% of Republicans still believe human activity is not causing any changes in the climate.

“Imagine being a candidate in Texas for the upcoming midterm, trying to make it through a Republican primary during a water crisis caused by a 22-year megadrought for which half your voters don’t think humans are responsible. And yet nearly 84% of Texans are affected, so you have to say something nuanced at a time when social media has rendered nuance a depreciating asset.

“With last July being the planet’s hottest month in recorded history and the West being the driest in 1,200 years, you would think we would be more unified on the issue. You would be wrong… In March, Pew reported that nearly 60% of conservative Republicans didn’t want the U.S. to join the international effort to fight climate change. Last year, current GOP darling Ron DeSantis loosely referred to efforts to address global warming as ‘left-wing stuff.’… These aren’t examples from decades ago. This is right now, as the rivers and lakes disappear. As talk of electricity loss and water restrictions become more real.” Facts seem to be very unpopular these days.

Still, California pays more into federal coffers than it receives in federal values, the opposite of most red states. Further, we must remember that nature does not succumb to political unpopularity or any form of denial. The laws of physics do not stand for reelection. Humanity proceeds at its own peril.

I’m Peter Dekom, and remember nature started with rocks, gas and water… and if life comes or goes, nature does not care!