Hostility to science mostly about money
At home here on Alabama’s Gulf Coast, we used our air conditioning over the winter almost as much as we used the heat. Mobile may not have had a record-setting winter, but it’s been unusually warm. On Christmas Day, the city recorded a historic high temperature of 80 degrees, which broke the record of 79 degrees that was set the year before, according to the National Weather Service.
Other Gulf Coast cities have been even hotter. Houston had its warmest winter on record, and Galveston tied or broke dozens of temperature records. Oceanographers say the Gulf of Mexico has been unseasonably warm; over the winter, for the first time on record, the average water surface temperature never fell below a balmy 73 degrees. That has led some climate scientists to suggest that spring may be a fierce season of extreme thunderstorms and tornadoes.
Not to worry. President Donald Trump has told us that climate change is merely a hoax invented by the Chinese. (It’s not clear what the Chinese would gain from such a ploy.) And to prove that he hasn’t the slightest interest in the warnings of climate scientists, he has gone briskly about the business of dismantling the regulations President Barack Obama painstakingly put into place to try to mitigate the effects of global warming.
Once upon a time, Republicans considered themselves a party of ideas, of vision, of rational decision-making. They employed reason and lauded fact. They embraced scientific discovery. Not anymore.
Among the most worrisome trends -- and there are many -seen in modern-day Republicans is their repudiation of science. The party has become a redoubt of fact-free propaganda, asinine conspiracy theories and foolish assumptions. There may be a significant group among them who still believe in scientific discovery, but they are largely silent, content to allow the flat-earthers lead the way.
Every now and then, a conscientious Republican tries to cajole his fellow partisans back toward sanity, if not reason and logic. Former congressman Bob Inglis, a Republican from South Carolina, is one such partisan. He heads the Energy and Enterprise Initiative, which promotes free enterprise solutions to climate change. But Inglis is still trying to find an audience among his former colleagues.
Meanwhile, so far, Trump has failed to fill important scientific
posts in his administration. He has, however, signaled an aggressive turn against scientific evidence. During the transition, for example, Trump’s team requested the names of Energy Department staffers who had worked on climate change. To their credit, higher-ups in the department declined to honor the request.
This unfortunate hostility toward science is not a case of GOP leaders following their constituents -- a development that may explain the party’s current stance on immigration. Instead, Republican voters, who now show a deep skepticism toward the science of global warming, have followed their leaders. And what distant star have GOP leaders been following? The money, of course.
Since the 1970s, fossil-fuel companies and other pollution-producing industries have invested heavily in campaigns to cast doubt on the science of climate change. Titans of those industries, such as Charles and David Koch, have also invested heavily in politicians who would do their bidding -- which means allowing certain industries to pillage and pol-
lute as they like.
When Trump announced his new order nullifying Obama’s Clean Power Plan, a sweeping set of government regulations aimed at reducing carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants, he surrounded himself with coal miners, who believe their industry has been unfairly targeted by environmentalists. Trump promised them that his new policies would send them “back to work.”
That’s just another promise the president won’t be able to keep. The use of coal has been in decline for decades, experts say, largely because of marketplace competition. Natural gas and wind and solar power have replaced coal in many industries. And where mines are still producing coal, many jobs have been replaced by mechanization.
In other words, the coal miners are unlikely to get any substantial benefit from new policies that will help to wreck the planet. Indeed, in the long run, no one will benefit.