Elizabeth Kolbert On How GQP Anti-Science Went From Dirty Dollars And Cents To An Article Of Faith
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As a problem, climate change is as bipartisan as it gets: it will have equally devastating effects in red states as in blue. Last week, even as Kentucky’s two Republican senators—Rand Paul and the Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell—were voting against the I.R.A., rescuers in their state were searching for the victims of catastrophic floods caused by climate-change-supercharged rain. Meanwhile, most of Texas, whose two G.O.P. senators—Ted Cruz and John Cornyn—also voted against the bill, was suffering under “extreme” or “exceptional” drought. How did caring about a drowned or desiccated future come to be a partisan issue? Perhaps the simplest answer is money. A report put out two years ago by the Senate Democrats’ Special Committee on the Climate Crisis noted, “In the 2000s, several bipartisan climate bills were circulating in the Senate.” Then, in 2010, the Supreme Court, in the Citizens United decision, ruled that corporations and wealthy donors could, effectively, pour unlimited amounts of cash into electioneering. Fossil-fuel companies quickly figured out how to funnel money through front groups, which used it to reward the industry’s friends and to punish its enemies. After Citizens United, according to the report, “bipartisan activity on comprehensive climate legislation collapsed.”
When it comes to direct contributions, the top recipient of fossil-fuel money in Congress this election cycle has been Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia. Manchin killed off earlier iterations of the climate bill, and inserted into this version most of its worst provisions, including a mandate that the federal government auction millions of acres for oil and gas drilling. Among the top twenty recipients of oil and gas money are three other Democrats: Senator Kyrsten Sinema, of Arizona, and Representatives Henry Cuellar and Lizzie Fletcher, of Texas. The rest are Republicans.
Even money, though, seems an insufficient explanation. The G.O.P.’s opposition to action on climate change has transcended crass calculation to become an article of faith. Several red states, including Texas and Louisiana, have taken steps to penalize financial firms that say they are reducing their investments in fossil fuels, even though these steps are likely to cost the states’ taxpayers money. As the I.R.A. was headed toward a vote, the Wall Street Journal reported that congressional Republicans were pressuring fossil-fuel companies to take a stronger stand against the bill. G.O.P. lawmakers, according to the Journal, had “become frustrated” by the oil companies’ support for some measures to combat climate change, and so they took to lobbying the lobbyists.
The I.R.A. has many flaws. Though it’s been widely reported that, by 2030, it will reduce the U.S.’s emissions by forty per cent compared with their levels in 2005, most of this projected reduction is attributable to other developments, including the fact that many power plants have already switched from coal to lower-emitting natural gas. But one of the bill’s many benefits is that it could finally break the partisan logjam. Today, roughly five hundred thousand Americans work in the petroleum industry, and another two hundred thousand work in the natural-gas sector. This represents a significant constituency for maintaining the fossil-fuel-powered status quo. If the I.R.A. functions as hoped, however, it will create hundreds of thousands of jobs in clean energy and, with them, a growing constituency for climate action. Among the bill’s provisions is a ten-per-cent “bonus” tax credit for companies that situate clean-energy projects in communities where coal-fired plants have been shuttered, or where a lot of people now work extracting oil or gas.
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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/22/how-did-fighting-climate-change-become-a-partisan-issue