On the front page of the December 3, 2018 Washington Post there appeared an article entitled “GOP falling in line with skeptics on climate.” The article cites Congresswoman and Senator-elect Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee falsely asserting that the earth has started to cool and also stating equally dishonestly that scientists have not reached a consensus on climate change.
Rick Scott, the Governor of Florida and Senator-elect, has admitted that the seas are warmer and rising and will be harmful to his state but will not admit that human activity has anything to do with it. And John Neely Kennedy who may announce for Governor of Louisiana in the near future recently said he agreed that the earth is getting hotter but asserted that “I’ve seen many persuasive arguments that it’s just a continuation of warming up from the Little Ice Age.”
On December 6, 2018 the Post published a further article on this subject. It noted that global carbon emissions are at a record high of 37.1 billion of tons of carbon per year. No nation is even close to meeting its voluntary carbon emission reduction level under the 2015 Paris Agreement. The United Nations Secretary General said “We are in trouble. We are in deep trouble with climate change.” And of course the President has announced U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement—for personal political reasons—thereby perhaps dooming any effective response to climate change.
So as President Trump becomes more and more isolated internationally and more and more irresponsible for denying that climate change is real, he has presided over a fundamental change of the U.S. Republican Party, pushing it to place climate change denial as one of the principal assertions of its ideological mainstream. But all these politicians know better, they know that climate change in real and they know it is an existential threat to the survival of human civilization. The Trump administration even admits this in arguing for a relaxation of the automobile efficiency rules instituted by the Obama administration which were designed to prevent billions of tons of carbon from being ejected into the atmosphere. The Trump administration has argued publicly that by the end of this century the average temperature of the earth will reach four degrees Celsius above preindustrial norms. At this level global warming will cause enormously catastrophic effects on earth and likely could not be stopped before reaching plus six Celsius—the geologically historic extinction level—so what difference would a few billion tons of carbon make. It has been argued that if the world average temperature reaches plus 3.7 Celsius there is not enough wealth in the world to stop it. It will just keep going until the world is too hot for human habitation.
Perhaps President Trump doesn’t care what happens to children in the future but many Republican members of Congress do have children and grandchildren about which they do care. And they understand that such a policy amounts to allowing the current generation to drive in big fast cars and risk their grandchildren burning. These members can’t want that, but that is the policy they are adopting.
The children and grandchildren of these members will curse them for leaving them with such a world at the end of the century—a world that is difficult to live in for humans as is and is also perhaps highly vulnerable to increases in warming not too many years in their future that will lead to a heat level that will not support human habitation. “Old grandpa Joe and/or grandma Jean when they served in the US Congress some 80 years ago, they made the pact with the devil making life difficult if not impossible for their children and children. Didn’t they care about us.” Why is this how Republicans in Congress want to risk being remembered? It is immorality on the highest scale.
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
John Adams—1798
“It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government.”
George Washington—1796
“It is too early for politicians to presume on our forgetting that the public good, the real welfare of the great body of the people, is the supreme object to be pursued; and that no form of government whatever has any other value than as it may be fitted for the attainment of this object.
James Madison—1788
John Jay