Families in the West who are trying to salvage what they can from the charred ruins of their homes may want to communicate their grief to the members of Congress who could do something to slow climate change, but won't. Global warming has made the drought, fires and personal losses worse than they otherwise would have been.
Weather extremes are no stranger to California, but scientists say the current drought is 15% to 20% more severe because of global warming. They say the odds of extreme droughts there have doubled over the last century.
In other words, global warming is injecting steroids into weather disasters. Without countermeasures, it will get much worse. Yet the response among deniers in Congress is to escalate their campaign to sabotage any government effort to reduce the pollution responsible for climate change. They are attempting to undermine not only President Obama's climate action plan, but also hopes for an international agreement at the next global climate conference this December in Paris.
To be more specific, the Republican-dominated denier chorus has been trying for months to strip EPA of the resources it needs to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. It has blocked President Obama's repeated proposals to reduce fossil energy subsidies. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has told states to ignore the Administration's new rule on carbon pollution from power plants; at last report, 25 states along with many utilities and trade groups were expected to join in lawsuits against the rule. The titular leader of the denial chorus, Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, says he will do everything in his power to block President Obama's proposal to provide $3 billion by 2020 for a $100 billion fund that developed nations are creating to help developing countries mitigate climate change. The fund is an essential component of an international climate treaty.
Most recently, Republican staffers led by McConnell's office reportedly are calling foreign embassies with the message that President Obama's commitment to cut U.S. emissions as much as 28% by 2025 - another essential requirement for an international deal -- is not worth the paper it is written on.
While these shenanigans are going on in Washington, the West is on fire, firefighters are risking and in some cases losing their lives, homes are burning to the ground and millions of acres of forests are turning from wildlife habitat and carbon sinks into ash. California's farmland, essential to our food supplies, is running out of water. Parts of the state are actually sinking into underground aquifers as water is withdrawn. Meantime, everything is perfectly healthy and normal in Denial Land (to paraphrase science fiction writer Jim Butcher). The nation's climate victims apparently are considered acceptable collateral damage.
One would think that Republicans are uncomfortable as climate deniers. Consider the intellectual bondage in which they find themselves. Most of the 17 candidates for the Republican presidential nomination are avowed climate deniers. They consider it a fundamental qualification for winning the support of their conservative base. But that base is relatively small -- probably less than 20% of American voters. The body of public opinion research over the last year or so shows that most Americans want the federal government to regulate carbon pollution, want the United States to sign on to an international climate agreement, want us to lead the world by example, and want a president who champions climate action. Young voters and Latinos, widely considered to be crucial constituencies in national elections, both support climate action. (I'll run all the numbers in my next post.)
It's a good bet that most members of the GOP-dominated denial caucus are fiscal conservatives. Inhofe has even led unsuccessful efforts to pass a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced federal budget. Yet he and his colleagues are ignoring that weather and climate disasters have become a runaway factor in federal spending. The National Oceanic and Space Administration (NOAA) is still scraping together data on the most recent extreme weather incidents, but it reports there have been 178 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters between 1980 and 2014, with total damages in excess of $1 trillion.
The Center for American Progress estimates that federal disaster spending totaled at least $136 billion between 2011 and 2013, although "no one in the government seems to know the cumulative federal cost of disaster relief."
Then there is coal. McConnell was elected to Congress in 1984 and has been one of its most powerful members for many years. He might be excused for fighting against policies that threaten coal production because coal production is big in his state. But encouraging states to ignore federal regulations and trying to scuttle a global climate treaty more than 20 years in the making by humiliating a sitting president - those antics are unworthy of a congressional leader. They also are rather stupid. As Republicans should have found out when 47 of them sent a letter to Iran last March to sabotage the State Department's work on a nuclear weapons treaty, antics like that end up embarrassing them more than the Administration.
Deniers insist that clean energy will kill jobs. Yet new wealth and jobs are being created rapidly in the renewable energy industry. There were more than 3.4 million "green jobs" in the United States in 2011 compared to about 944,500 jobs in coal, oil and gas, according to data gathered by the Citizens' Climate Lobby. The investment advisory group Motley Fool reports that jobs in the solar energy industry alone grew 20% in 2013. "The bottom line is job growth in renewable energy is strong and the industry continues to grow as costs fall," Motley Fool says.
Meantime, layoffs continue in the oil and gas industry as the world oil market conspires to keep prices low. And for all of McConnell's power, coal jobs in Kentucky dropped to their lowest level on record during the first three months of this year.
The industry cannot blame President Obama, not credibly at least. Jobs in the coal industry have been declining for generations. The industry's stock prices have been falling for years and so has the price of solar energy systems. Barclays downgraded the entire U.S. utility sector's high-grade bonds in May not because of a perceived "war on coal", but because solar energy and emerging storage technologies offer cleaner and less risky alternatives for electric generation.
To sum up, the denial caucus is ignoring the climate's impact on federal spending, resisting what's best for the economy, thwarting the wishes of the majority of the American people and, most egregious of all, ignoring the suffering of the growing number of disaster victims. Deniers also are ignoring the repeated warnings from the military and intelligence communities that climate change is a bona fide national security threat. They apparently are in denial too about the immorality of their position, a topic Pope Francis might touch on when he addresses a joint session of Congress on September 24.
The deniers in Congress and the Republican presidential field need to get on the right side of history. If they don't, they'll deserve to end up on the wrong side of next election. And maybe even the Pearly Gates.