As The Window Closes, GQP Deploys Delay Intead Of Climate Denial As It Blathers On About "Messaging"
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In a way, the economic chaos caused by the pandemic has created a historic opportunity for the Biden administration. As one White House adviser tells me, “If you are going to pump billions of dollars into the economy, why not use those dollars to help us transition away from fossil fuels?” This is one of the central ideas behind Biden’s $2tn infrastructure bill, which is now being negotiated in Congress. Already the pushback is fierce, especially in states that have benefited from the fracking boom. Shortly after Biden issued his first round of executive orders aimed at the climate crisis, the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, held a press conference in the middle of the gas fields “to make clear that Texas is going to protect the oil-and-gas industry from any type of hostile attack launched from Washington DC”.
Republicans, along with stalwart fossil-fuel allies like the Heritage Foundation, recently convened a private retreat in Utah to plot ways to “reclaim the narrative” on climate, while Republican senators like Tennessee’s Marsha Blackburn continue to recycle tired old rants about how the Paris agreement is destroying American jobs.
Every day it becomes clearer that the fight for a stable climate is increasingly inseparable from a fight for justice and equity. Catherine Coleman Flowers, who was on a taskforce that helped shape Biden’s climate policy during his campaign, grew up and works in Lowndes county, Alabama. “I see a lot of poverty here,” Flowers says. “And I see a lot of people who suffer from the impacts of climate change – whether it is heat, or disease, or poor sanitation and polluted drinking water. You can’t separate one from the other. They put sewage lagoons next to the houses of poor people, not rich people. They put oil pipelines through poor neighborhoods, not rich ones.”
For more than 30 years now, scientists and politicians have been aware that our hellbent consumption of fossil fuels could push us out of the Goldilocks zone and force humans to live in a world we have never inhabited before. As Biden’s push for climate action gets real, we will learn a lot about how serious human beings are about living on this planet, and how far the powerful and privileged are willing to go to reduce the suffering of the poor and vulnerable. If political leaders don’t take the climate crisis seriously now, with all they know, with all they have been through already, will they ever? “Climate advocates keep saying, ‘This is it, this is it, this is it,’ ” warns Podesta. “But this really is it. If we don’t amp up and accelerate the energy transformation in this decade, we’re goners – really goners.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/16/climate-crisis-last-chance-emergency