In case you missed it, conservatives severely We care about whales and the oceans now.
At least, that’s the message from the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank that filed suit in 2021 against New England offshore wind project. Although taken Lots of money from oil and gas interestsTPPF has fought a battle over the past year and a half claiming Deep concern for whales Allegedly vulnerable to offshore wind turbines. (I don’t recall this kind of distress from conservatives about how increased offshore oil development in the Gulf of Mexico might harm whale habitat, or alerting me about any of the myriad studies showing that a rapidly warming ocean would fundamentally alter life on land , but it doesn’t matter.)
While concern for the environment and simultaneous support for big polluting industries may seem counterintuitive, the GOP has a deep line of green running through it. Richard Nixon The Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970; George Bush Sr. presided over the sweeping adjustment of the Clean Air Act in 1990. There are still some vestiges of these attitudes today, even if they live only in rhetorical talking points. Even former President Donald Trump, who actively worked to strip the EPA of much of its power and Disassemble various environmental protectionI like to talk about “clean air” and “crystal clear water”.
Since Bush’s passage of the Clean Air Act, the party has apparently done 180 actions on the government’s role in protecting the environment. Now, GOP members of Congress are likely to float measures to ban the EPA or Obstruction of the Endangered Species Act.
For sale now
Two of our favorite VPNs
Protect your private data
We share and access a lot of private data every day which can cause some big problems if that information falls into the wrong hands.
Some historians I assume The Republican Party’s increasing reliance on corporate money and special interest groups has helped the party shift away from environmentalism and toward questioning the science behind government measures necessary to keep people and the planet safe and healthy. Climate change is the primary factor in this timeline: it is no coincidence that James Hansen Sound the alarm on climate change before Congress in 1988 and that the oil industry campaigned for climate denial I started next year by forming one of the industry’s first sponsored rejection groups.
The Republican Party is at a strange crossroads. The American public has steadily increased its acceptance of climate science and is increasingly concerned about the effects of climate change. Red states like Florida, are staring down the barrel of sea level rise, already passing legislation To adapt, with the tacit understanding that it is only the beginning of things getting worse. Even the major oil companies make net zero Plans (albeit worthless).
From some angles, it looks like a climate delay might be the preferred GOP tactic here — admitting change is happening but actually denying it. anything to stop it. Political leaders on the right like Dan Crenshaw, who Attend the Climate Summit 2021 in Glasgow, And presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, who has Pass some climate-friendly legislation, are great examples of that. These personalities prefer to take measures such as planting a lot of trees, developing some adaptation measures, and promoting expensive and inefficient technology such as carbon capture.
It’s not just the Republican Party that is at a crossroads. Over the past decade, the American conversation about climate change has focused on combating the “deniers” on the right. Much of the Democrats’ environmental rhetoric has portrayed the climate crisis as a matter of right and wrong. The passage of the first climate legislation in the United States last year—both of them Incredibly historical And not enough—signs of drastic change. We have nearly a decade to come together, and there are plenty of difficult choices ahead—like how to drill for critical minerals, how to locate the massive amount of renewable energy infrastructure we’ll need, and how to do it. Re-ensure that everyone benefits equitably from the energy transition. Conversations about climate and what we do for the earth are no longer as simple as deniers vs. climate hawks.
Another branch of pseudoscientific GOP ecologists is poised to capitalize on this tension: the kind that uses other environmental concerns as a way to delay climate action. in article In “How Climate Alarms Wiped Out the Real-Life Environment,” published this month in American Greatness, a right-wing publication, author Edward Ring lists “environmental disasters” that he claims are not discussed “because (people) make so much money to push the climate change process fraud;” These disasters include loss of insect diversity (partly, he claims, caused by wind turbines) and oceanic garbage patches (he doesn’t mention how the oil industry continues to drive plastic production). This is a version of the same strategy taken by the Texas Public Policy Foundation and other organizations trying to stop offshore wind development out of supposed concerns for whales, birds, and others.Sharpen life. (While scientists are still investigating the long-term effects of wind on marine life, many suggest that turbines will have the same level of influence Like other ocean infrastructure such as oil platforms; The scientists said The turbines are not responsible for the recent wave of whale deaths along the East Coast.)
In case you need a reminder, the driving force behind all this fake anxiety: dirty money. Ring is a senior fellow at the California Policy Center Part of the Koch-funded State Policy Network; American Greatness is the news arm of the American Greatness Fund, a research organization and related PAC Established By former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale. Another conservative group working against wind turbines, ostensibly for the safety of whales, is Kaiser Rodney Institutewhich is also part of the state policy network has been taken hundreds of thousands of dollars in petrodollars and Koch money.