Essay by Eric Worrall
The New Yorker claims the big oil money has begun to divide partisan US climate policy. But there is a better explanation.
How Does Combating Climate Change Become a Partisan Issue?
Twenty years ago, Senator John McCain tried to spearhead an effort. What has happened to the Republicans since then?
Via Elizabeth Kolbert
August 14, 2022…
A dilemma, climate change is also bipartisan: it will have equally devastating effects in the red states as it does in the blue states. Last week, even as two Republican senators from Kentucky – Rand Paul and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell – were voting against the IRA, rescuers in their state were searching for victims of the battle. catastrophic flooding caused by increased rain caused by climate change. Meanwhile, most of Texas, where two GOP senators – Ted Cruz and John Cornyn – also voted against the bill, are suffering from “extreme” or “exceptional” drought.
How has concern for a drowning or dry-dead future become a partisan issue? Perhaps the simplest answer is money. A report released two years ago by the Senate Democrats’ Special Committee on the Climate Crisis said, “During the 2000s, a number of bipartisan climate bills circulated in the Senate. hospital.” Then, in 2010, the Supreme Court, in a decision by Citizens of the Union, ruled that corporations and wealthy donors could effectively pour in an amount of cash. limited to elective activities. Fossil fuel companies quickly figured out how to move money through front groups, using it to reward industry friends and punish its enemies. After Citizens United, according to the report, “bipartisan activism on comprehensive climate legislation collapsed.”
Even so, even money seems like an inadequate explanation. The GOP’s opposition to climate change action has passed puzzling calculation into a dogma. …
…
Money is certainly an “incomplete explanation”, because for a long time there has been a lot of money flowing from renewable institutions to politicians, at least since President Carter installed solar panels on the White House in 1979. Supporting climate action is not exactly the political path to poverty. Nancy Pelosi’s son Paul, who is believed to have significant interests in Lithium mines in Asia, is now facing charges of making money by taking advantage of his mother’s political position..
So what is the real explanation for the split between Democrats and Republicans over climate policy?
My personal favorite explanation is Lord Monckton caused division, by convincing Republicans that the climate movement was the Trojan horse for communists and world government advocates. Monckton impressed Republicans who asked him to appear before the Congressional Energy and Environment Subcommittee in 2009.
Monckton is a special advisor to Margaret ThatcherConservative government of the United Kingdom from 1982 to 1986, and had a side seat throughout the period Thatcher raised the climate movement become an international priority, by talk about the alleged climate threat on the world stage. Some have speculated Thatcher advanced the climate cause because she needed a political weapon to defeat submissive warrior coalitions, but few remember Thatcher as a qualified scientist. Thatcher’s Chemistry graduate thesis was on X-ray crystallography. She might be really interested in CO2 emissions and global warming.
According to Monckton, the climate movement Thatcher championed later turned into a new home for radical anti-capitalists and leftists.
The last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachevappeared in the climate movement in 1993, when he founded International Green Crossfollow 1992 Rio Earth Summit.
I don’t know what influence Gorbachev had on the apparent transformation of the green movement, but as the leader of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev was no friend of Capitalism. Gorbachev rejected capitalismeven after it was clear Deng Xiaoping’s limited but genuine capitalist reforms successfully revived Communist China’s economy.
Have a lot of openly anti-capitalist in today’s green movement.
Famous author Terry Pratchett explained”In the bathtub of history, truth is harder to grasp than soap, and much harder to find“. Any explanation of such a complex period contains assumptions, gaps, and interpretations, including mine.
I enjoyed reading readers’ theories on how the split happened. I was very young when some of these events happened, so I didn’t learn about most of them until long after they happened. Maybe some of you were in person when Lord Monckton presents his views to US Republicans.
Update (EW): h/t Chris Hanley – The record contains Lord Monckton’s presentation to Parliament in 2009.
Related
