Watching Republicans ignore climate change while the planet cooks is like being trapped in the backseat of a car, windows rolled up and locked, with a chain-smoking uncle. Coughing falls on deaf ears. Complaining earns a string of invectives. Explaining the science of carcinogens and lungs makes him twitch and light cigars, plural.
The underwhelming results from the UN Climate Conference in Dubai feel the same. Although petrostates agreed to eventually crack the car window after a 30-year journey, they still insist on smoking while driving.
Two perspectives on the Climate Agreement
The conference produced a signed pact under which 198 signatory nations, including the United States, agreed to transition away from fossil fuels.
Many hail the development as an historic climate first.
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In a glass-is-half-full analysis, petrostates finally acknowledged that burning fossil fuels — their national product and the source of their massive wealth — is causing the catastrophic rise in global temperatures. The U.S. special envoy for climate change, John Kerry, called the pact “the most important decision since the Paris agreement.” The UN describes the agreement as “the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era by laying the (foundation) for a swift, just and equitable transition, underpinned by deep emissions cuts and scaled-up finance.”
Others see a glass half empty.
Critics point out that the agreement merely reflects an aspiration, a vague intention to eventually transition away from fossil fuels, without any kind of timeline or specific plan of action. The pact lacks a binding commitment to cut carbon emissions, in time certain, with a scheduled phase-out of oil, coal and gas.
From this perspective, 30 years of world leaders meeting at the UN to tackle climate change produced nothing except an admission of guilt from the tortfeasors. If it took 30 years for fossil fuel giants to finally admit that their product is destroying the biosphere, how many more species, rivers, islands and farms must disappear or suffer irreparable damage before they actually do something about it?
2023: a year of record temperatures
The UN conference took place in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, at the close of the hottest year on record.
Although the Earth’s climate has changed throughout history, our current warming trend is accelerating at a rate scientists have never before witnessed, which is attributed to the burning of fossil fuels.
Scientists’ warnings are dire: We are fast approaching the climate tipping point, beyond which human life as we know it will devolve dramatically. As Scientific American puts it, “the world is approaching thresholds of no return as temperatures rise, water resources shrink, plants and animals go extinct and humanmade materials accumulate in natural systems.”
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What we needed from the climate summit in Dubai, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was an aggressive and binding commitment to cut emissions in half by 2030, or within six years, in order to keep the global average temperature rise short of 1.5°C and stave off calamity.
But instead of a detailed and binding plan, the UN pact tiptoes around so as not to offend the tortfeasors. In the way that a Post-It note on the refrigerator encourages you to choose a carrot, not a cookie, the agreement “encourages” nation states to increase reliance on alternative energy sources, and to “contribute to efforts to reduce carbon emissions” in ways that leaders of each signatory nation see fit.
It is painfully obvious by now that some leaders of some signatory nations, especially China, India and Republicans in the U.S. who are financed by Big Oil, don’t see fit.
GOP-led states double down on climate misinformation
NASA scientists — far and away the most highly respected scientists in the world — have confirmed that the causal link between burning fossil fuels and climate change has evolved from “theory” to “established fact.”
They report, “It is undeniable that human activities have produced the atmospheric gasses that have trapped more of the sun’s energy in the earth system. This extra energy has warmed the atmosphere, ocean, and land, and widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, and biosphere have occurred.”
NASA’s truthful climate assessment prompted Republican members of the Senate Commerce Committee to propose de-funding NASA’s climate work.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and his colleagues circulated a memo accusing NASA and other federal agencies of exceeding their charter, seeking to graft nonsensical limitations onto these agencies’ congressional mandates in order to block their dissemination of climate science.
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The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, for example, provides “daily weather forecasts, severe storm warnings, climate monitoring to fisheries management, and coastal restoration, and supports marine commerce.” According to Cruz, addressing climate data exceeds this core mission, therefore, NOAA should lose federal funding. Fox News headlined this insane anti-science censorship as, “Ted Cruz, Republicans expose woke climate initiatives in Biden’s budget,” proving that the tumor of MAGA ignorance is wildly metastatic.
The malignancy has spread nationwide. Attacking climate intelligence is now part of Republican culture wars. In 2023, according to investment tracker Pleiades Strategy, Republican lawmakers introduced 165 pieces of legislation throughout 37 states that would block state investors from even considering how climate change will affect their investment portfolios. Never mind that climate-related losses exceeded $1 billion in the first half of 2023 alone, according to the NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information, or that climate destruction has cost $2.570 trillion since economists started tracking it. If you think about climate risk when investing millions in an oceanfront development, you’re “woke.” If you’re in Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Florida, you’re also probably a pedophile “groomer.”
Fossil fuel interests promote climate disinformation
Energy companies’ spending on federal elections nearly quadrupled following the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which allowed them to spend unlimited funds to directly support or oppose political candidates. In payback, Republicans have long denied and distorted climate science, amplifying a massive, decades-long disinformation campaign.
Earlier this year, alarmed by slow responses to our heating planet, the Union of Concerned Scientists identified, by name, Republicans who routinely protect the oil and gas industry in exchange for specified campaign donations. Paradoxically, politicians most opposed to climate progress hail from states most affected by climate change.
Last year, for example, Louisiana and South Carolina, whose coasts are disappearing because of rising sea levels, and whose populations have been waylaid by increasingly powerful storms, helped to successfully challenge the EPA’s authority to curb power plant carbon emissions in West Virginia v. EPA.
In Mississippi, where coastal shrinkage is also obvious, the attorney general brags about her “fight (against) Biden’s radical environmental agenda.”
Oil-funded Republicans in the state of Texas are working to kill their own state’s lucrative green energy companies.
The state of Florida, where insurers have all but vanished due to excessive climate-related claims, opposes reducing on-road CO2 emissions to net-zero by 2050. DeSantis, having received millions in fossil fuel contributions, dismisses climate change as “left wing stuff.”
Project 2025 and Republicans’ goal to end clean energy
Parts of the planet are fast becoming uninhabitable. The sexagenarians and septuagenarians funded by fossil fuels today will be gone in 20 or 30 years, and they appear to care naught for their own grandchildren.
Dropping all pretense of protecting people and instead prioritizing the short-term trajectories of their own careers, Republicans recently unveiled their plan to kill climate progress altogether. Project 2025 — the product of Trump-loving ex-bureaucrats, oil operatives and political hacks — proposes to erase clean energy programs from the federal government entirely while boosting the production of fossil fuels.
Republicans are still chafed over Biden’s success in passing the Inflation Reduction Act, the most significant climate act passed in U.S. history to incentivize and hasten the U.S. transition to a clean energy economy. The act took effect in January 2023, and it will take time before its economic and climate benefits are felt. Project 2025 aims to block that progress by shredding all regulations designed to curb greenhouse gas emissions from cars, power plants and oil and gas wells. Formulated by the Heritage Foundation, which is funded in part by Koch oil money, the plan would dismantle virtually all federal efforts at reducing the nation’s carbon footprint in an effort to bolster American fossil fuel production.
As fossil fuel interests continue to wield politically formidable wealth, the exploding costs of drought, floods, storms and fires will continue to fall on people who can’t afford them.
We will remain captive in an oxygen-depleted car, gasping for air, until every voter under the age of 40 shows up at the polls to eject the chain-smoking driver.
Sabrina Haake is a columnist and 25-year litigator specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. Follow her on Substack.
