Big Surprise: Tea Partiers Don't Believe in Global Warming

This is more unsurprising news. According to a poll by the Pew Research Center, it turns out that folks who identify themselves with the tea party are more likely to deny or question the existence of global warming, with only 25 percent of this faction of the GOP saying that global warming is a reality. That stands in stark contrast to the 67 percent of Americans (including 61 percent of Republicans) who say they believe that the world is warming.

            My guess about this is that tea party folks are twofold: First, it seems to me that many in the tea party are prone to believing fantastical unreal things. Barack Obama was born in Kenya, despite evidence to the contrary; Barack Obama is a Socialist, despite evidence to the contrary; Barack Obama is a Muslim, despite evidence to the contrary. Many in the tea party believe this stuff. Second, the folks who say they are in the tea party are more likely to get their “news” from Fox News, which has done really questionable reporting on climate change, as well as from talk radio, which can be even worse when it comes to global warming and mendacity.

            Given their disproportionate influence on the GOP, as well as the rest of our politics—remember these folks brought you the partial government shutdown—the misinformation and ignorance on the climate that the tea party embraces is even more destructive and dangerous than their partial government shutdown.

Danger: It's More Than Obamacare on the Chopping Block For the GOP

The political blackmail that the GOP is using, that of threatening a government shutdown in order to render the new healthcare legislation toothless by defunding it, has been the headline grabbing news over the last couple of weeks and has only intensified over the last few days. But there is more to the shenanigans that the Grand Old Party is up to.

            The Republicans are now using the mechanism of raising the debt ceiling as a way to give away a wish list to big oil, King Coal, and other industries. According to the New York Times, GOP leaders sent to their rank and file a laundry list of provisions they want attached to the bill to raise the debt ceiling. Besides delaying Obamacare and limits on malpractice, the wish list includes such anti-environmental provisions as giving a green light to the construction of the Keystone pipeline, more offshore oil and gas drilling, more permitting of oil and gas exploration on federal lands, rolling back regulation on coal ash, and blocking the EPA’s new regulations on greenhouse gas production.

            Wow.

            Politically, the GOP controls the House, but that is only due to some ingenious Gerrymandering that some of the states were recently able to pull off. The party of Lincoln has failed to gain the popular vote for the presidency in five of the last six elections, and the one win for the GOP was for a sitting president, George W. Bush, who barely won. This isn’t the only time that the Republican Party has become a loser. Things were so bad for them in the seventies after Nixon’s disgrace and resignation that they considered changing the name of the party.

All these latest giveaways to business and industry that the GOP is trying to work into the debt ceiling deal are, of course, all about campaign donations and money. But what they are proposing is so extreme that I sense a crazed sort of nihilism that wants to pull in and destroy what is good and great about this country while this political party experiences what may be a death spiral.

League of Conservation Voters: 112th Congress Most Hostile to the Environment in 40 Years

One of the themes that I revisit through these blog posts is the manner in which clean water, clean air, and living in a sound environment have become politicized. What we Americans have valued in common has been transformed into a liberal-conservative conflict, with the moneyed interests largely supporting GOP candidates and representatives. While they also have Democratic politicians in their pockets—you only have to look at Democrats like West Virginia’s Joe Manchin to see how energy dollars pay for the votes of Democrats—the issue of the environment too often falls along a divide between the Democratic Party and the Grand Old Party.

            This news from the League of Conservation Voters goes to show just how far we have drifted into being a country that has a government that does not serve its citizens. The League judged this last Congress as the one most hostile to the environment in the last 40 years. The environmental organization was particularly scathing in its comments about the GOP controlled House, which systematically blocked advances on climate change legislation.

            Some of the legislation that the report discussed is the stuff that only schoolyard bullies would dream up. H.R. 4078, the Red Tape and Small Business Job Creation Act, sponsored by Arizona representative Tim Griffin would halt all new public safeguards, no matter how much they are needed or how many people they might help, as long as unemployment remains above six percent. Never mind that high levels of unemployment look likely for several years to come or that much of what the GOP has been doing has kept unemployment at high levels for years already. The Stop the War on Coal Act would repeal the scientific finding by the EPA that greenhouse gasses endanger human health and the environment.

            The list goes on, Keystone tar sands oil, cleaning up the Gulf from the BP disaster, general conservation, genetically modified salmon, etc., etc. Besides a list of disasters, I see very little of a democratic process working when I see a report like this. Is public financing of political campaigns a remedy? We need to do something before too long, before our world becomes too warm and our lakes and rivers are once again treated like public dumping grounds and sewers.

Mitt Romney's Acceptance Speech Gets Cheers When It Comes to Accepting Global Warming

This is only a portion of Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech from Thursday night. In less than two minutes, and mostly using political code words such as “protect the sanctity of life” and “honor the institution of marriage,” The GOP nominee touches on themes meant to fire up the base of the GOP: taxes, gay marriage and abortion. You would think that any of his pledges on these hot button issues would bring the house down.

            It is when he gets to the environment and its protection, saying, “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet . . . My promise is to help you and your family,” that the crowd in the convention hall is truly electrified.

This is big crazy if ever there was big crazy. As I’ve pointed out before, this has been going on with the Grand Old Party for over 30 years, politicizing the environment. It is nonetheless surprising—and I have to admit, a little scary, too—to see an entire convention of people cheering on the warming planet, the rising oceans, and a political system that is incapable and unwilling to do anything about it.

More Facts, More Inconvenience, and More Laws For Ignorance

I hope that this is not a trend. As I previously posted, North Carolina is trying to legislate ignorance by requiring that the science of climate change is excluded from studies of sea level rise. Well, it looks like Virginia is following suit with a similar push by that state’s GOP legislators to similarly exclude science from a coastal study in their state.

            The curious thing for me is the manner in which climate change science was characterized by GOP lawmaker Chris Stolle. He called scientific terminology “left wing terms” and “political speech.”

The push to politically isolate environmentalism, which traditionally has always enjoyed broad public support, to a politics of the left goes back at least to the 1980 presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan. Reagan and others characterized environmentalism as left wing and extreme.

            Now in Virginia we have gone to another level. The inconvenient facts, the science that indicates a warming world and rising seas—what concerns environmentalists and is actually a concern for just about everybody else—is now thought of as political, and left leaning political at that. This is big crazy and makes my head spin.

North Carolina GOP: Maybe We Can Pretend That Global Warming Will Just Go Away

The state of North Carolina is on the verge of stuffing their fingers in their ears and saying “Blah, blah, blah!”

            And they want a law to do it.

            Apparently GOP legislators of the state don’t like some news that has come out of their state’s Coastal Resources Commission, which said that, due to global warming, an increase of about one meter in sea level can be expected by the year 2100. Coastal North Carolina is low lying. A rise of that much ocean could threaten 2000 square miles of the eastern part of that state.

            Instead of preparing for the rising waters and the threats that it may make on communities and infrastructure, North Carolina GOP lawmakers are circulating a bill that takes those inconvenient findings of the scientists and makes them go away. The proposed legislation restricts the measurement of sea level rise to the state’s coastal commission using historical records. Using any predictions based upon climate science would be against the law.

            Take away that pesky science stuff and all that global warming and rising seas goes away!

            Delaware, Louisiana, California, as well as other states, are preparing for sea level rises of a meter or more. Maine is preparing for a rise of up to two meters. But in Louisiana their GOP lawmakers want to stick their fingers in their ears and shout “Blah, blah, blah! Global warming is not happening!” In the meantime North Carolinians could build houses in coastal areas, only to see them become ruined by rising tides, and the building of protective structures, like higher seawalls, could be delayed needlessly.

            If this bill is any precedent, the Grand Old Party of North Carolina will next make it against the law for meteorologists to predict rain on days when picnics are planned.

Make all that sea level rise stuff go away!

Hat tip to my friend Robin for telling me about this story.

Big Crazy

I’ve been trying to remain uninformed as to the goings on of the relentless GOP debates that have been sucking up time on the TV and radio and consuming space on websites and newspapers. It is noteworthy, however, that this weekend John Huntsman dropped out of the race.

            The candidates are not stupid individuals. Ron Paul was a physician before entering politics and Newt Gingrich has a Ph.D. Yet it has been only Huntsman to be the sole GOP candidate who is not denying the science, the reality, of global warming. Gingrich, in the past, has talked about global warming and acknowledging not only the reality of the phenomenon but the need to address the crisis. He even famously made this commercial with Nancy Pelosi about global warming.

Paul’s website equivocates on the issue but suggests that the best way to solve this “nonproblem” is to reduce regulation.

            I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Huntsman was the only candidate to acknowledge that global warming is happening and that he is one of the first GOP candidates to drop out of the race.

I have a term “big crazy.” It’s when a lot of people who should know better or could be better informed choose to believe things that are obviously loony. Belief in UFOs is big crazy. Big crazy also describes conspiracy theories. Big crazy has been around for a long time in politics. Legal segregation was big crazy. McCarthyism and the Red scare were big crazy, too.

There was a time, perhaps as little as15 or 20 years ago, when a reasonable person could have some reasonable doubts about man-made climate change. But that is no longer. With Huntsman dropping out, we now have the guarantee that the Grand Old Party’s nominee for 2012 will deny the existence of global warming. Despite the thinning ice sheets and all the science, that is the way it’s going to be. This is big crazy, and the GOP is guaranteed to give us a big crazy candidate.