At Some Point Climate Denying Politicians Will Have To Be Punished— Severely
Did anyone ever say fighting Global Warming would be easy or the transitioning to renewable energy would have no political costs? Yesterday, the Senate voted 53-47 to disapprove of a Department of Transportation Rule to lessen greenhouse gas emissions on U.S. highways. All the Republicans and the two proto-Republicans, Manchin and Sinema, were joined by two Democrats worried about their reelections, conservative Dem Jon Tester (MT) and always progressive-when-it’s-easy Sherrod Brown (OH). The resolution will pass the House and Biden says he’ll veto it.
The rule was never much to begin with. It requires state transportation planners to calculate greenhouse gas emissions related to highway use and set targets for reducing that pollution. The rule gave states leeway to set targets and imposed no penalties for not meeting them. But even that was too much for special interests determined to destroy the planet.
The White House statement called the rule “a common-sense, good-government tool for transparently managing transportation-related GHG emissions and informing transportation investment decisions.”
Yesterday, a friend of mine who bought a small home in eastern Cuba and spend more time than most of us do on the island told me that among all the other things you can’t get in Cuba now are cigars and rum. Much of what you can’t get in Cuba is due to the ass-backwards U.S. embargo, which should have been ended 3 decades ago. But the culprit behind the lack of cigars and rum is Global Warming, but which screwed up tobacco and caned production. If mankind doesn’t bite the bullet and unite to fight it, we’ll be united in shared misery instead. Just remember it wasn’t just a mental midget like Marjorie Traitor Greene screeching about how it’s all a hoax; it’s also political cowards who do know better, like Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester.
On Tuesday, David Gelles warned that the extreme weather, melting glaciers, warm oceans are “all the product of global warming, which is being driven by the release of the three most important heat-trapping gases: carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide” the emissions of which have continued soaring (but getting lower, getting worse). “Last year, humans spewed some 36.6 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, the most ever. That number may well be higher this year. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now more than 50 percent higher than it was before the industrial revolution. It’s no secret where all this carbon dioxide is coming from. The burning of oil, coal and gas is the main source of CO2 emissions, and the use and production of fossil fuels continues to rise around the world, with the United States producing more oil and gas than ever before. And even as the build out of renewable energy is speeding up, the appetite for fossil fuels remains strong, in part because overall energy demand is soaring.”
Yet even when Biden tried the weakest, puniest attempt at amelioration— one with negligible sacrifice from anyone— well… you saw what happened yesterday.
