Who Will Prevail in the Climate Change Debate?

By SAM URETSKY

L­ook at it this way, if the conspiracy succeeds, New York City might become the world capital. It could be a lot worse. Democrats would enjoy taking over the Pfizer building for government offices and telling Ian Read, Pfizer’s CEO ($23.3 million pay package in 2014) that if he wants to be head of an Irish company for tax purposes, he can jolly well go live in Ireland.

Republicans, using Washington, D.C., as a model, might insist that NYC residents lose the right to vote in national elections. That would turn the nation’s 4th bluest state red.

Most nations already have embassies in New York, so that they wouldn’t really care, and while

Vladimir Putin would probably object, the Russian oligarches who have been buying up high end Manhattan condominiums might change his mind. Also, Donald J Trump might find a place for President Putin in the Trump Tower and they could have regular meetings of their mutual admiration society.

The details of the conspiracy aren’t known, but what information we have comes from Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee. Sen. Inhofe is perhaps best known for having thrown a snowball onto the floor the the Senate as a means of disproving reports of global warming.

According to *The Hill*, Sen. Inhofe warned about the insidious conspiracy on June 11, 2015, when the Heartland Institute and Heritage Foundation gave him the Political Leadership on Climate Change Award for his work against environmental policies. “The United Nations is the reason that this all came along. We all know that” he said. ““They want independence. They don’t want to be accountable to anybody, to the United States or any other country.”

According to the report, Jim DeMint, formerly senator from South Carolina and now president of the Heritage Foundation, said Inhofe “has championed an ethic of rational conversation and conservatism that we must preserve our environment for the sake of people, not hurt them by entertaining ill-conceived doomsday prophecies which are neither honest nor scientific.”

Sen. Inhofe also explained that the Polar Bear problem isn’t loss of polar ice; it’s over-population of Polar Bears.

The fact that Sen. Inhofe was named chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee should be scary enough, but the Clinton campaign has put out a new commercial quoting Republican contenders saying, with pride, that they are not scientists and questioning the reality of global warming.

Others believe, but they don’t want to do anything about it. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said, “We’re not going to destroy our economy the way the left-wing government we’re under wants to do.”

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie had a similar opinion: “We shouldn’t be destroying our economy in order to chase some wild, left-wing idea that somehow, us, by ourselves, are going to fix the climate.”

The Republicans apparently believe that efforts to save the planet would cost jobs, ignoring the immense number of jobs that would be created converting to clean energy.

When the Associated Press had a panel of scientists grade contenders on the accuracy of their statements about climate change (the scientists were not told who said what) former Secretary Clinton scored 94/100, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley 91/100 and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders 87/100. The highest-rated Republican was Jeb Bush with a 64/100 and Ted Cruz scored 6/100.

Sen. Bernie Sanders has made the point that we go through life trusting professionals. We accept the authority of a service advisor about automobile care and a physician on health care (except where red state politicians have dictated what physicians say about pregnancy or must not say about firearms safety) but on what is probably the single most important issue facing all the people on this planet, where 97% of scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals warn about the reality and proximity of irreversible climate change, the debate is over.

The vast majority of the scientific community has spoken. Climate change is real, it is caused by human activity, and it is already causing devastating harm here in the United States, and to people all around the globe. So what are we going to do about it? We will act boldly to move our energy system away from fossil fuels, toward energy efficiency and sustainable energy sources like wind, solar, and geothermal because we have a moral responsibility to leave our kids a planet that is healthy and habitable.”

Secretary Clinton, speaking to the League of Conservation Voters said, “You pushed for and rallied behind President Obama’s use of the Clean Air Act to set the first ever federal limits on carbon pollution from existing power plants, which are driving the most dangerous effects of climate change. As you know so well, power plants account for about 40 percent of the carbon pollution in the United States, and therefore must be addressed. And the unprecedented action that President Obama has taken must be protected at all cost.”

There are lots of important issues to discuss in this campaign, but they won’t matter if we don’t have a planet to discuss them on. Maybe it really is a conspiracy – but then the question is, whose?

Sam Uretsky is a writer and pharmacist living on Long Island, N.Y. Email sdu01@outlook.com.

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2016


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