https://climatejustice.social/@breadandcircuses/113289032171493870 breadandcircuses@climatejustice.social - Excerpts from an opinion piece in Current Affairs that does not mince words...
Hurricanes have occurred throughout living memory, and every hurricane season is going to have deadly storms, but warming oceans make the storms worse, causing higher wind speeds, heavier rainfall, and more severe storm surge. The warming itself is, of course, caused mostly by the burning of fossil fuels.
This really is not complicated. We have to stop using fossil fuels as rapidly as possible, because they’re causing a massive global calamity that is not just bringing us worse storms, but drawing us closer to irreversible tipping points that will escalate the speed of changes and cause human suffering on an unprecedented level. Scientists who study planetary “vital signs” say we are imperiling the very fabric of life on our planet and causing an “abrupt climate upheaval, which jeopardizes life on Earth like nothing humans have ever seen.”
You would think, then, that because of the serious harm being done, our political leaders would be treating the situation as an emergency and acting accordingly. Not so. In fact, there is an astonishing amount of denial, and it’s bipartisan.
On the right, Republicans just outright deny climate science, which J.D. Vance calls “weird science” and Donald Trump thinks is a Chinese hoax. Even Florida politicians like Marco Rubio downplay the problem despite its immense harmful impacts on the state. The state’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has stripped mentions of climate change from state laws, perhaps in the hope that by pretending the problem doesn’t exist, we can make it go away.
The right’s denialism is atrocious. They seem to want to march us straight into the abyss.
But let’s be honest: Democrats haven’t been much better.
Democrats have shifted in the way they discuss climate change. Instead of emphasizing the seriousness of the problem and the need to pivot away from fossil fuels, they boast about record levels of oil and gas production. The issue can be awkward for Democrats, and recently the White House was seeking to avoid the fact that President Biden, who has called for a transition away from fossil fuels, has overseen the biggest oil and gas boom in United States history.
The Wall Street Journal, in a remarkable recent report, says Big Oil is trying to make sure Donald Trump doesn’t gut the Democrats’ signature “climate law,” the Inflation Reduction Act. That’s not because fossil fuel companies want to save the planet, but because the law actually contains huge handouts to them!
The failure by our political class to deal with this completely solvable issue is staggering and shameful. Many of them have children and grandchildren. Presumably they would like their descendants to inherit a world worth living in. And they could make that happen. Unfortunately, it would require challenging the power and profits of some of America’s most influential corporations.
Those corporations have lobbyists crawling all over U.N. climate summits to make sure any global action is watered down to the point of uselessness — which they do with the support and collaboration of Democrats who supposedly care about the crisis and think it’s real!
FULL ARTICLE -- https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/you-should-be-furious-at-the-political-class-for-enabling-this-climate-catastrophe
#Politics #Science #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis
