As Mark notes just below, GOP climate denial is coming to bite Willard in the behind. But this still begs the fundamental question: of all the issues in the world, why has the Republican Party developed such an incredible antipathy to doing anything about or even acknowledging the reality of anthrpogenic climate change? After all, there are policies that good conservatives could support to mitigate climate change — most notably, a revenue-neutral carbon tax.
And then suddenly, it dawned on me. Mark has previously noted one profound truth about the current GOP, viz.:
Today’s Republican Party is a coalition between those who want to repeal the Progressive Era and those who want to repeal the Enlightenment.
The problem with such a coalition, of course, is that the two wings feel strongly about policies that have little to do with each other. Many if not most hedge-fund managers are pro-choice and believe in the separation of church and state; many evangelical Christians do not feel that closing the carried-interest loophole puts us on the Road to Serfdom (although that might be changing).
Now consider the climate issue: climate change policy represents a perfect sweet spot, a place where plutocrats and theocrats can agree not for expedience but in principle.
Plutocrats like the Koch Brothers hate climate change regulation because it is regulation; it is an example of the government telling them that they cannot do something because it might hurt other people, and of course the Koch Brothers (like all toddlers) hate being told that they are not perfect. For theocrats, the necessity of climate change policy means acknowledging the reality and validity of scientific investigation; it requires conceding that not all possible knowledge is contained in Scripture.
So when a plutocrat declares that climate change is a hoax, theocrats will vigorously nod their heads. The two wings of the Republican coalition are worshipping a different God — theocrats worship the God of the Book of Revelation, and the plutocrats worship Ayn Rand — but because climate change answers their deepest ideological needs so perfectly, they can agree. Any attacks on climate policy by one wing reinforce the prejudices of the other wing. That’s not the case with, say, banning abortion in the case of rape, or expanding tax shelters in the Caymans.
It’s a match made in…well…somewhere.
Author: Jonathan Zasloff
Jonathan Zasloff teaches Torts, Land Use, Environmental Law, Comparative Urban Planning Law, Legal History, and Public Policy Clinic - Land Use, the Environment and Local Government. He grew up and still lives in the San Fernando Valley, about which he remains immensely proud (to the mystification of his friends and colleagues). After graduating from Yale Law School, and while clerking for a federal appeals court judge in Boston, he decided to return to Los Angeles shortly after the January 1994 Northridge earthquake, reasoning that he would gladly risk tremors in order to avoid the average New England wind chill temperature of negative 55 degrees.
Professor Zasloff has a keen interest in world politics; he holds a PhD in the history of American foreign policy from Harvard and an M.Phil. in International Relations from Cambridge University. Much of his recent work concerns the influence of lawyers and legalism in US external relations, and has published articles on these subjects in the New York University Law Review and the Yale Law Journal. More generally, his recent interests focus on the response of public institutions to social problems, and the role of ideology in framing policy responses.
Professor Zasloff has long been active in state and local politics and policy. He recently co-authored an article discussing the relationship of Proposition 13 (California's landmark tax limitation initiative) and school finance reform, and served for several years as a senior policy advisor to the Speaker of California Assembly. His practice background reflects these interests: for two years, he represented welfare recipients attempting to obtain child care benefits and microbusinesses in low income areas. He then practiced for two more years at one of Los Angeles' leading public interest environmental and land use firms, challenging poorly planned development and working to expand the network of the city's urban park system. He currently serves as a member of the boards of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy (a state agency charged with purchasing and protecting open space), the Los Angeles Center for Law and Justice (the leading legal service firm for low-income clients in east Los Angeles), and Friends of Israel's Environment. Professor Zasloff's other major activity consists in explaining the Triangle Offense to his very patient wife, Kathy.
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The insurance industry may play a role in this dispute, since it believes in rising sea levels and increasing storm surges. The evidence clobbers it on the head repeatedly.
Being situated in a coastal area is a “pre-existing” condition which makes the filing of property claims more likely, and uninsurable communities are going to present some very difficult problems in the near future.
Politicians may become irrelevant to discussions of the reality of climate change if property damage cannot be insured. What will the Koch brothers say to their fellow non-believers when the latter cannot protect themselves from huge losses, and they are priced out of the insurance market?
Actuaries, not the climate scientists, may be the people who finally move the issue into the reality-based arena. They are a pretty unsentimental bunch. Who will convince the bean-counters that an unstable climate is a hoax and that they should lower their rates?
Politicians may become irrelevant… What will the Koch brothers say to their fellow non-believers when the latter cannot protect themselves from huge losses…
Are you kidding? In their world view this is why politicians exist.
Actuaries, not the climate scientists, may be the people who finally move the issue into the reality-based arena.
They already have across the planet, save for the areas with odd political economies and white Anglo-saxon conservatives who still wield power.
Although every one of those areas have militaries that have already moved on, and have plans for when climate change hits really hard. That is: it already is in the reality-based arena. Our jacked-up political economy is not in this arena; it is outside, about two blocks away - it can smell the dung and hear the crowd when the wind is right, but no way it is going in that place just yet.
Actuaries, not the climate scientists, may be the people who finally move the issue into the reality-based arena. They are a pretty unsentimental bunch. Who will convince the bean-counters that an unstable climate is a hoax and that they should lower their rates?
Given the fact that insurance carriers generally do not supply flood insurance due to the risk pool being small compared to the potential claims, they already have.
The theocrats have fully integrated American anti-intellectualism into their world view: God would not abandon us to live in a world where educated people with expert knowledge have important things to say about policy.
The greedhead Republicans are willing to embrace Jerry Falwell’s agenda in order to enact Gordon Gekko’s agenda. And vice-versa for the authoritarian, self-styled “Christians” who perceive their deity to be such a weenie that He needs help from Caesar.
Possibly the secret intuition they’ll never understand is that “He” is in the end, them. And Falwell’s got them chasing after the rapture while mother nature gets it from Gekko in the alley.
There’s also the matter of theodicy: Sure, God let’s bad things happen to good people, but He’s not going to roast us (at least, not before we die). Also, it’s nonsense to suppose that humans can supplant God by wreaking havoc with nature itself. And the Rapture is going to be next week anyway.
It’s hopeless. Even in liberal Seattle everybody drives gas-guzzling SUVs and wants more freeways. Good lord, Obama was bragging about fracking during the debate. Our only hope is bolshevism.
It’s hopeless. Even in liberal Seattle everybody drives gas-guzzling SUVs and wants more freeways.
IMHO human evolution stopped and we ascended to our highest level of incompetence when we moved from hunter-gatherers to agrarians. We have no clue how to conduct our affairs with these population numbers. This dovetails extremely well with what we can learn about the fates of organisms from population biology.
It’s purely tribal.
The person who was most responsible for bringing Global Warming to public attention was Al Gore. He is from the Democratic tribe, so Republicans feel required to disbelieve in it.
During the transition between Clinton and Bush, the Clinton foreign policy team warned the Bush team that Al Qaeda was a growing problem. The Bush team reasoned that if Democrats believed it, it couldn’t be true.
Tribal thinking exists on both sides, but, on the Republican side it is immune to any adjustment based on facts. My brother, who is quite intelligent and generally scientific, is a Republican because he wants lower taxes on his high income. He doesn’t believe in Global Warming because he thinks Al Gore has a house that’s too big. This is how they think.
Indeed, some conservative columnist - David Brooks IIRC - recently claimed that it was Gore’s fault Republicans refused to accept climate change. When he became involved, the GOP antipathy toward him made them reject the whole idea. These guys are something else.
What does that say about Republicans, that they’d rather trash the climate than admit Gore was right? And that’s Brooks’s defense?!
Yes. It was Brooks.
Here’s the quote I was talking about:
IOW if the Evul Librulz hadn’t brought it up, the Right would have jumped right on it - riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiggggggggghhhhhhhhht.
Brooks is somebody who is not only on my sh*t list, but when anybody actually uses him as a measure of intelligence or sanity, they go on my list.
It’s simpler, as I see things. Suppose anthropogenic climate warming is real, with unpleasant consequences. Then it is arguable that we ought to use our powers over nature to take action against climate warming, via carbon taxes, encouragement of green industries, and other measures. In the nature of things, these measures will have to of large scale and long duration; they will require changes in the “natural” way of doing things, and some of these changes will involve government coercion.
Change? Coercion? Taxes? Just about all conservatives would rather have their appendices removed without anesthesia than submit to such demands. And the sidewalks aren’t buckling from the heat in midwinter yet…. So its very very tempting to imagine that global warming is just a myth cooked up by liberals and pointy headed intellectuals as part of their plot to rule the world.
I don’t think the theocrats came to climate denial as easily as the plutocrats. The Creation Care movement among evangelicals, now quiescent, focused primarily on climate change and biodiversity loss as indicators of man’s bad stewardship.
My guess is the theocrats went along because of the broader culture war and especially because many climate deniers started to promote evolution denial as well.
“The Creation Care movement among evangelicals, now quiescent, focused primarily on climate change and biodiversity loss as indicators of man’s bad stewardship.”
Among ‘evangelicals’, or among ‘liberal evangelicals’, or at least among ‘not-bashit insane rightwing wh*reson evangelicals’?
“My guess is the theocrats went along because of the broader culture war and especially because many climate deniers started to promote evolution denial as well.”
IOW, sciencem denial.
On more element of the groups that make up the Repugnicant Party is those who want to repeal the Civil Rights Act.
Maybe a match made somewhere in Cantos XVIII - XXXI!
I don’t think so much principle is involved. While it’s true that the theocrats
don’t much like science, the main issue is the influence of Big Oil and Big Coal -
which of course was enormous in the Bush/Cheney era. As a secondary issue,
any climate change policy is going to have winners and losers, and since the
Republicans are firmly on the side of whoever’s making a lot of money right now,
they’re always going to oppose changes which might shuffle the deck.
Adaptation is good for you. It is good for the rich countries and it is good for the poor countries who would otherwise be asked to please stay poor until carbon-neutral energy is able to displace fossil fuels at a competitive price. We should still have enough time to colonize Mars or Venus or some moon of Saturn, even if climate change is as bad as certain predictions suggest it will be. I think I am serious about this. I accept that there are straight-forward solutions to environmental issues like conservation of natural resources and restricting the use of poisons, but restricting the use of fossil fuels as a class? There are a lot of economic interests, but there are also serious issues of international law, which is good at some things, but which is really not sophisticated enough to deal with an issue like this.
Never mind.
The left has enough blind spots of its own regarding science that someone was able to write a whole book on the subject.
JZ: “theocrats worship the God of the Book of Revelation..”
As I recall it, the God of Revelations plans to terminate flawed existing government (the Roman Empire) with extreme prejudice, killing most of the world’s population is an interesting range of disasters, and institute direct rule of the few elect, cutting out human intermediaries. The mercifully small number of Christians who have identified their own immediate political agenda with this apocalyptic vision have been egalitarian revolutionaries. See Norman Cohn’s great The Pursuit of the Millennium.