It’s where the conspiracy theorizing and menacing of critics began.
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| Vice President Mike Pence and President Trump during a briefing about Hurricane Florence in the Oval Office on Sept. 11, 2018. Credit Pete Marovich for The New York Times |
The
answer is, the kind of the party that, long before Trump came on the
scene, committed itself to denying the facts on climate change and
criminalizing the scientists reporting those facts.
The G.O.P. wasn’t always an anti-environment, anti-science party. George H.W. Bush introduced the cap-and-trade program that largely controlled the problem of acid rain. As late as 2008, John McCain called for a similar program to limit emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming.
But McCain’s party was already well along in the process of becoming what it is today — a party that is not only completely dominated
by climate deniers, but is hostile to science in general, that
demonizes and tries to destroy scientists who challenge its dogma.
Trump
fits right in with this mind-set. In fact, when you review the history
of Republican climate denial, it looks a lot like Trumpism. Climate
denial, you might say, was the crucible in which the essential elements
of Trumpism were formed.
Take Trump’s
dismissal of all negative information about his actions and their
consequences as either fake news invented by hostile media or the
products of a sinister “deep state.” That kind of conspiracy theorizing
has long been standard practice among climate deniers, who began calling
the evidence for global warming — evidence that has convinced 97 percent of climate scientists — a “gigantic hoax” 15 years ago.
What was the evidence for this vast conspiracy? A lot of it rested on, you guessed it, hacked emails.
The credulousness of all too many journalists about the supposed
misconduct revealed by “Climategate,” a pseudo-scandal that relied on
selective, out-of-context quotes from emails at a British university,
prefigured the disastrous media handling of hacked Democratic emails in
2016. (All we learned from those emails was that scientists are people —
occasionally snappish, and given to talking in professional shorthand
that hostile outsiders can willfully misinterpret.)
Oh,
and what is supposed to be motivating the thousands of scientists
perpetrating this hoax? We’ve become accustomed to the spectacle of
Donald Trump, the most corrupt president in history leading the most
corrupt administration of modern times, routinely calling his opponents
and critics “crooked.” Much the same thing happens in climate debate.
The truth is that most prominent climate deniers
are basically paid to take that position, receiving large amounts of
money from fossil-fuel companies. But after the release of the recent
National Climate Assessment detailing the damage we can expect from
global warming, a parade of Republicans went on TV to declare that scientists were only saying these things “for the money.” Projection much?
Finally, Trump has brought a new level of menace to American politics, inciting his followers to violence against critics and trying to order the Justice Department to prosecute Hillary Clinton and James Comey.
But climate scientists have faced harassment and threats,
up to and including death threats, for years. And they’ve also faced
efforts by politicians to, in effect, criminalize their work. Most
famously, Michael E. Mann, creator of the famous “hockey stick” graph,
was for years the target of an anti-climate science jihad by Ken Cuccinelli, at the time Virginia’s attorney general.
And
on it goes. Recently a judge in Arizona, responding to a suit from a
group linked to the Koch brothers (and obviously not understanding how
research works), ordered the release of all emails from climate scientists at the University of Arizona. To forestall the inevitable selective misrepresentation, Mann has released all the emails he exchanged with his Arizona colleagues, with explanatory context.
There are three important morals to this story.
First,
if we fail to meet the challenge of climate change, with catastrophic
results — which seems all too likely — it won’t be the result of an
innocent failure to understand what was at stake. It will, instead, be a
disaster brought on by corruption, willful ignorance, conspiracy
theorizing and intimidation.
Second,
that corruption isn’t a problem of “politicians” or the “political
system.” It’s specifically a problem of the Republican Party, which has
burrowed ever deeper into climate denial even as the damage from a
warming planet becomes more and more obvious.
Third,
we can now see climate denial as part of a broader moral rot. Donald
Trump isn’t an aberration, he’s the culmination of where his party has
been going for years. You could say that Trumpism is just the
application of the depravity of climate denial to every aspect of politics. And there’s no end to the depravity in sight.
Links
Links
- The climate report the Trump administration didn’t want you to see
- How Trump is ensuring that greenhouse gas emissions will rise
- ‘Yeah, I don't believe it’: Trump on his administration’s own climate report – video
- Trump on own administration's climate report: 'I don't believe it'
- How air pollution could end up killing you
- How limiting greenhouse gases would substantially benefit the US economy
- Why water will be the next battleground in the fight against climate change
