This is an extraordinary screed by none less than Krugman. Read it though. The last month or so has seen the whole Climate MEME been peddled non stop by every possible shill. I think that Paul knows something about economics.
Now he is a leading expert on the clear truth of climate warming and conservative political opinion. It is really outrageous..
As i have actually posted for over fifteen years, it is impossible to form an opinion regarding either global warming or global cooling and its future average direction. We have neither a significant signal in the data nor even enough time to generate one. Instead we have thousands of folks either paid or bullied into saying it is so. Millions of NAZIs thought that they were right as well. Same drill.
It is all about their power. Be scared. .
The Party That Ruined the Planet
Republican climate denial is even scarier than Trumpism.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/12/opinion/climate-change-republicans.html
The
most terrifying aspect of the U.S. political drama isn’t the revelation
that the president has abused his power for personal gain. If you
didn’t see that coming from the day Donald Trump was elected, you
weren’t paying attention.
No, the real
revelation has been the utter depravity of the Republican Party.
Essentially every elected or appointed official in that party has chosen
to defend Trump by buying into crazy, debunked conspiracy theories.
That is, one of America’s two major parties is beyond redemption; given
that, it’s hard to see how democracy can long endure, even if Trump is
defeated.
However, the scariest reporting I’ve seen recently has been about science, not politics. A new federal report finds that climate change in the Arctic is accelerating, matching what used to be considered worst-case scenarios. And there are indications that Arctic warming may be turning into a self-reinforcing spiral, as the thawing tundra itself releases vast quantities of greenhouse gases.
Catastrophic sea-level rise, heat waves that make major population centers uninhabitable, and more are now looking more likely than not, and sooner rather than later.
And Republican climate denial is rooted in the same kind of depravity that we’re seeing with regard to Trump.
As I’ve written in the past, climate denial was in many ways the crucible for Trumpism.
Long before the cries of “fake news,” Republicans were refusing to
accept science that contradicted their prejudices. Long before
Republicans began attributing every negative development to the
machinations of the “deep state,” they were insisting that global
warming was a gigantic hoax perpetrated by a vast global cabal of
corrupt scientists.
And long before
Trump began weaponizing the power of the presidency for political gain,
Republicans were using their political power to harass climate
scientists and, where possible, criminalize the practice of science
itself.
Perhaps
not surprisingly, some of those responsible for these abuses are now
ensconced in the Trump administration. Notably, Ken Cuccinelli, who as
attorney general of Virginia engaged in a long witch-hunt
against the climate scientist Michael Mann, is now at the Department of
Homeland Security, where he pushes anti-immigrant policies with, as The
Times reports, “little concern for legal restraints.”
But
why have Republicans become the party of climate doom? Money is an
important part of the answer: In the current cycle Republicans have
received 97 percent of political contributions from the coal industry, 88 percent from oil and gas.
And this doesn’t even count the wing nut welfare offered by
institutions supported by the Koch brothers and other fossil-fuel
moguls.
However, I don’t believe that
it’s just about the money. My sense is that right-wingers believe,
probably correctly, that there’s a sort of halo effect surrounding any
form of public action. Once you accept that we need policies to protect
the environment, you’re more likely to accept the idea that we should
have policies to ensure access to health care, child care, and more. So
the government must be prevented from doing anything good, lest it
legitimize a broader progressive agenda.
Still,
whatever the short-term political incentives, it takes a special kind
of depravity to respond to those incentives by denying facts, embracing
insane conspiracy theories and putting the very future of civilization
at risk.
Unfortunately, that kind of
depravity isn’t just present in the modern Republican Party, it has
effectively taken over the whole institution. There used to be at least
some Republicans with principles; as recently as 2008 Senator John
McCain co-sponsored serious climate-change legislation. But those people
have either experienced total moral collapse (hello, Senator Graham) or
left the party.
The truth is that
even now I don’t fully understand how things got this bad. But the
reality is clear: Modern Republicans are irredeemable, devoid of
principle or shame. And there is, as I said, no reason to believe that
this will change even if Trump is defeated next year.
The
only way that either American democracy or a livable planet can survive
is if the Republican Party as it now exists is effectively dismantled
and replaced with something better — maybe with a party that has the
same name, but completely different values. This may sound like an
impossible dream. But it’s the only hope we have.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
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Paul
Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a
Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York Graduate
Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for
his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman
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