When will GOP open eyes to the climate?

I suppose one practical way to look at the global climate emergency this summer is that it’s not so much the

102-degree high last week in Portland, Ore. that matters.

Even though that is crazyhot for that cold and rainy City of

Roses. Central and

Eastern Oregon have long baked in the summers; Portland almost never has.

Until now. Or, rather, until last summer, when Portland hit an absurd 116 F., beating the former record high of 107 set in 1965 by a ridiculous nine degrees.

No, Oregon doesn’t matter, in terms of moving the needle on the consciousness-raising that has to happen for the people of the world to demand action to protect our planet.

Oregonians already believe in global weirding. It’s not a matter, there, of being a Democrat or a Republican. And there are plenty of Republicans left there, especially rural ones. But Oregon GOPers (excepting a few militia nuts Idaho-adjacent) are of the Mark Hatfield variety. The kind who come down to Stanford for a master’s in poli sci before returning to Oregon and serving as its governor and United States senator. The kind who as a youngster in the Oregon House, after driving Paul Robeson up to Portland since he couldn’t get a hotel room in Salem, being Black, introduced and got passed legislation that prohibited discrimination based on race in public accommodations.

Sensible Republicans.

No, it’s the Republicans in red states such as Missouri and Kentucky who, after last week’s insane weather in their neck of the woods, will I hope be getting the wake-up call on the climate, seeing as how they just got schooled in the fact that deadly new weather caused by climate change is not a progressive Squad-fueled conspiracy theory.

It’s just a fact, one that we ought to do something about.

In the past, Fox News, the propaganda they watch in the place of actual vetted information, has told them that the coming disaster fueled by the burning of carbon was a liberal pipedream aimed at draining their pocketbooks.

Now, the disaster is not an impending one. It’s here. Last week, more than nine inches of rain fell in the St. Louis area overnight, the highest 24-hour rainfall total ever on record there. The city normally gets a combined 7.31 inches of rain during all of July and August combined.

In eastern Kentucky, at least 16 people are dead and hundreds will lose their homes after flooding that saw the north fork of the Kentucky River surpass its previous top height by five feet. Think that got Appalachia to sit up and take notice of a simple fact, no matter what the state’s in-denial politicians say?

The air holds more moisture in already humid places as temperatures rise. That pours down as record rain. Nothing hard to understand there.

Global warming and its disastrous effects doesn’t have to be about politics. In Britain, the Conservative Party-led Parliament in 2019 passed a law that committed the UK to a binding target of net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Practical Tories don’t see the point in the calls for delay that is the new denialism on the part of the head-in-the-sand GOP leaders here. It’s not as if they can hide from their constituents the fact that this month Britain saw its high-temperature records shattered three times in one July afternoon, hitting 104.5 in the village of Coningsby. There is essentially no AC in the British Isles. You can’t camouflage the danger by owning the libs. So they don’t.

When are American Republicans going to rise up and demand their leaders open their eyes to the obvious?