Ever see The Day After Tomorrow, the 2004 film based on the 1999 book, The Coming Global Superstorm, by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber? It was the first blockbuster about the Climate Crisis I ever saw and the villains were, realistically, Republicans, who usher in the end of the world… or at least the Northern Hemisphere. The president dies and the evil vice president sets up a new U.S. government in the American embassy in Mexico City. In this happy scene at the end of the film, as many as a couple hundred people survived in New York City and get rescued— and astronauts on the space station notice the air is the most clear they’ve ever seen it.
At a certain point— I’m guessing we’ll pass that point by next Thursday or Friday— it will be too late. Too late because the oil companies are rich enough to bribe all the politicians to not do anything about stopping the end of the world. It’s worth it for Republicans to own the libs, even if it means consigning their grandchildren to hell. Yesterday Lisa Friedman wrote about “Project 2025, a conservative ‘battle plan’ for the next Republican president, [that] would stop attempts to cut the pollution that is heating the planet and encourage more emissions.” That’s right, right now sick, deranged conservatives, under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation, “are laying the groundwork for a 2024 Republican administration that would dismantle efforts to slow global warming… The plan calls for shredding regulations to curb greenhouse gas pollution from cars, oil and gas wells and power plants, dismantling almost every clean energy program in the federal government and boosting the production of fossil fuels— the burning of which is the chief cause of planetary warming.
Friedman reported that “The Heritage Foundation worked on the plan with dozens of conservative groups ranging from the Heartland Institute, which has denied climate science, to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which says ‘climate change does not endanger the survival of civilization or the habitability of the planet.’”
There is a pronounced partisan split in the country when it comes to climate change, surveys have shown. An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll conducted last month found that while 56 percent of respondents called climate change a major threat— including a majority of independents and nearly 90 percent of Democrats— about 70 percent of Republicans said global warming was either a minor threat or no threat at all.
…The blueprint said the next Republican president would help repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, the 2022 law that is offering $370 billion for wind, solar, nuclear, green hydrogen and electric vehicle technology, with most of the new investments taking place in Republican-led states.
The plans calls for shuttering a Department of Energy office that has $400 billion in loan authority to help emerging green technologies. It would make it more difficult for solar, wind and other renewable power— the fastest growing energy source in the United States— to be added to the grid. Climate change would no longer be considered an issue worthy of discussion on the National Security Council, and allied nations would be encouraged to buy and use more fossil fuels rather than renewable energy.
The blueprint throws open the door to drilling inside the pristine Arctic wilderness, promises legal protections for energy companies that kill birds while extracting oil and gas and declares the federal government has an “obligation to develop vast oil and gas and coal resources” on America’s public lands.
Notably, it also would restart a quest for something climate denialists have long considered their holy grail: reversal of a 2009 scientific finding at the Environmental Protection Agency that says carbon dioxide emissions are a danger to public health.
Erasing that finding, conservatives have long believed, would essentially strip the federal government of the right to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from most sources.
…The plan calls on the government to stop trying to make automobiles more fuel efficient and to block states from adopting California’s stringent automobile pollution standards.
…Climate advocates said the Republican strategy would take the country in the wrong direction even as heat waves, drought and wildfires worsen because of emissions.
“This agenda would be laughable if the consequences of it weren’t so dire,” said Christy Goldfuss, chief policy impact officer for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.
Republicans who have called for their party to accept climate change said they were disappointed by the blueprint and worried about the direction of the party.
…Representative John Curtis, Republican of Utah, who launched a conservative climate caucus, called it “vital that Republicans engage in supporting good energy and climate policy.”
Without directly commenting on the GOP blueprint, Curtis said “I look forward to seeing the solutions put forward by the various presidential candidates and hope there is a robust debate of ideas to ensure we have reliable, affordable and clean energy.”
Benji Backer, executive chairman and founder of the American Conservation Coalition, a group of young Republicans who want climate action, said he felt Project 2025 was wrongheaded.
“If they were smart about this issue they would have taken approach that said ‘the Biden administration has done things in a way they don’t agree with but here’s our vision’,” he said. “Instead they remove it from being a priority.”
He noted climate change is a real concern among young Republicans. By a nearly two-to-one margin, polls have found, Republicans aged 18 to 39 years old are more likely to agree that “human activity contributes a great deal to climate change,” and that the federal government has a role to play in curbing it.
Of Project 2025, he said, “This sort of approach on climate is not acceptable to the next generation.”
Bernie penned a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and 3 progressive senators signed onto it, Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Ed Markey (D-MA). No one else. First three paragraphs explain why only the 4 of them and no one else: “We write to strongly urge the Department of Justice to bring suits against the fossil fuel industry for its longstanding and carefully coordinated campaign to mislead consumers and discredit climate science in pursuit of massive profits. The actions of ExxonMobil, Shell, and potentially other fossil fuel companies represent a clear violation of federal racketeering laws, truth in advertising laws, consumer protection laws, and potentially other laws, and the Department must act swiftly to hold them accountable for their unlawful actions.
“The fossil fuel industry has had scientific evidence about the dangers of climate change and the role that burning fossil fuels play in increasing global temperatures for more than 50 years. As early as 1959, Edward Teller warned the American Petroleum Institute that carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels would raise global temperatures. In 1975, Shell-backed research concluded that increasing atmospheric carbon concentrations could cause global temperature increases that would drive ‘major climatic changes’ and compared the dangers of burning fossil fuels to nuclear waste. Beginning in the late 1970s, Exxon— now ExxonMobil— conducted extensive research on climate change that predicted curren t rising temperatures ‘correctly and skillfully.’
“Despite these companies’ knowledge about climate change and the role their industry was playing in driving carbon emissions, they chose to participate in a decades-long, carefully coordinated campaign of misinformation to obfuscate climate science and convince the public that fossil fuels are not the primary driver of climate change. As stated in a lawsuit filed by the State of Minnesota, the fossil fuel industry ‘spent millions on advertising and public relations because they understood that an accurate understanding of climate change would affect their ability to continue to earn profits by conducting business as usual.’”
I wouldn’t vote for anyone unwilling to sign onto that letter.
William Stafford died in 1993 long before DeSantis and the GOP started their sick anti-woke campaign. "A Ritual to Read to Each Other" was published 5 years later-- still long before the sickness began taking hold. This is the final stanza:
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep; the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
Look at the very last question on the list:
