Another step towards climate apocalypse

(Second of two parts)

The question is, how did letting the planet burn become a key GOP tenet?

It wasn’t always thus. The Environmental Protection Agency, whose scope for action the court just moved to limit, was created by none other than Richard Nixon. As late as 2008, John McCain, the Republican nominee for president, ran on a promise to impose a cap-and-trade system to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

Republican positioning on the environment is also completely unlike that of mainstream conservative parties in other Western nations. One study – from a few years back, but I don’t think the fundamentals have changed – found that most conservative parties do support climate action and that the Republican Party “is an anomaly in denying anthropogenic climate change.” And yes, the GOP is still into climate denial; it may sometimes admit that climate change is real while insisting that nothing can be done about it, but it reverts to denial every time there’s a cold snap.

So what explains the Republican climate difference? One natural answer is “follow the money”: In the 2020 election cycle the oil and gas industry gave 84 percent of its political contributions to Republicans; for coal mining, the number was 96 percent.

But I suspect that money is only part of the story; in fact, to some extent the causation may run the other way, with the fossil fuel sector backing Republicans because they’re anti-environment rather than the other way around.

My skepticism about a simple follow-the-money story comes from a couple of observations. One is that Republicans have staked out anti-science positions on other issues, like COVID vaccination, where the monetary considerations are far less obvious: As far as I know, the coronavirus isn’t a major source of campaign contributions.

Also, while the Republican position on climate is an outlier compared with “normal” conservative parties, it’s actually typical for right-wing populist parties. (Side note: I hate the use of the word “populist” here, because Republicans have shown no inclination toward policies that would actually help workers. But I guess we’re stuck with it.)

In other words, the politics of climate policy look a lot like the politics of authoritarian government and minority rights: The Republican Party looks more like Hungary’s Fidesz or Poland’s Law and Justice than like the center-right parties other countries call conservative.

Why, exactly, are authoritarian rightwing parties anti-environment? That’s a discussion for another day. What’s important right now is that the United States is the only major nation in which an authoritarian right-wing party – which lost the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections yet controls the Supreme Court – has the ability to block actions that might prevent climate catastrophe.