The New York Times headline screamed for our attention:
In the Synthesis Report for the Sixth Assessment Report, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) states that unless people and their countries change course soon, it is “likely that warming will exceed 1.5°C during the 21st century and make it harder to limit warming below 2°C.”
This Sixth Assessment Report is referred to as AR6 for short. In her comments in response to AR6, Elizabeth Kolbert writes:
As the name of the synthesis report suggests, the latest from the I.P.C.C. contains no new data; it simply pulls together information that has already been published. Nevertheless, the synthesis manages to alarm in new ways. So much damage is already occurring with 1.1 degrees of warming, it observes, that probably the harms of further climate change are even greater than had been predicted. Meanwhile, the odds of avoiding a temperature increase of 1.5 degrees C—considered by many scientists to be a key threshold—are approaching zero. Even under a best-case scenario, with global greenhouse-gas emissions declining both quickly and dramatically, “warming is more likely than not to reach 1.5° C,” the report states.
The Republican Party does not care about such warnings. Instead, it is pushing an agenda that is all about increasing the use of carbon:
California Rep. Kevin McCarthy, speaker in the chamber that Republicans do control, and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, from drilling state Louisiana, are bolstering their energy platform now with an eye to the 2024 election that will include a fight for the White House.
Named the “Lower Energy Costs Act,” the legislation draws from a number of bills advanced by House committees over the past few weeks that focused primarily on long-held Republican priorities, such as boosting fossil-fuel production. House leaders even assigned the bill the honorable designation H.R. 1, perhaps to signify its importance to the GOP majority that won back the House in the midterms.
Essentially, Republicans want to downplay the arguably longer-term risks of dangerously rising global temperatures that result from greenhouse gas emissions put off by coal, oil and gas and focus on providing the lower costs they assign to a wide offering of energy sources. That leaves traditional energy at the heart of their platform, but can include wind, solar, nuclear, hydrogen and other alternatives with GOP priority given to market-based solutions in these areas, they say.
On his part, President Biden is equally playing politics. Kolbert reminds us:
Just last week, the Biden Administration approved an enormous new oil-drilling venture, the Willow project, in Alaska. ConocoPhillips, the company in charge, plans to pump oil out of the project for thirty years, which is to say well beyond mid-century.
During the campaign politicians say one thing and then do the direct opposite after they are elected!
You certainly noticed AR-15 in the title of this post. The same Republicans who can’t be bothered with AR6 are the staunchest defenders of private, individual, ownership of AR-15, which is military grade firearm used since Vietnam.
AR-15 was what the gunman used in the horrific shooting at the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. During the election campaign, the Democratic candidate for the gubernatorial job, Beto O’Rourke emotionally and publicly challenged the sitting governor, Greg Abbott, who was running for re-election.
O’Rourke lost. Abbott and the GOP strengthened their control over Texas politics.
Recent reports suggest that the police hesitated to confront the gunman in Uvalde because they realized he was using an AR-15.
“You knew that it was definitely an AR,” Uvalde Police Department Sgt. Donald Page said in an interview with investigators after the school shooting. “There was no way of going in. … We had no choice but to wait and try to get something that had better coverage where we could actually stand up to him.”
You read that correctly. The police were scared of AR-15 and they knew they would be instantly killed if they stepped up in front of the gunman. Yes, police with guns were afraid of AR-15. Yet, the same police overwhelmingly support the GOP that believes that it is a god-given right to own an AR-15.
Our collective futures depend on acting on AR6 and banning AR-15. But, these actions will not happen as long as we have half the country dismissing the IPCC’s findings as bullshit while pointing their AR-15s at the rest of us.
What are you going to do about this?