GOP is continuing to ignore climate change | Other views - Chico Enterprise-Record

GOP is continuing to ignore climate change | Other views - Chico Enterprise-Record

Aware of one climate disaster after another, I’ve been thinking a lot about the late, great Octavia Butler, who foresaw the effects of climate change — and our failure to forestall it — sooner than most of us. “Parable of the Sower,” the first installment of what she intended as a trilogy, was published in 1993, long before the warnings about a warming climate became routine. She not only understood the ramifications for the planet, but also, like many brilliant writers, understood the follies of human nature.

What follies they are! Over the last month or so, news outlets have delivered a daily barrage of terrifying headlines about extreme weather events and their consequences. Yet, powerful industries and their conservative lackeys in Congress have responded by trying to kill modest measures meant to combat climate change.

Last year, a Democrat-controlled Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which included billions for climate resilience and decarbonization. Not a single Republican voted for it. Now, a Republican-controlled House is determined to hack away at the plans to mitigate climate change. They started by targeting those proposals in their foolish hijacking of the debt ceiling.

While they were not able to do much damage there, they are still at it. Though the GOP almost always aims to cut taxes, no matter the damage to the federal budget, House Republicans have hypocritically introduced bills that would revoke tax credits to boost clean energy production and place new limits on tax credits for purchasing electric vehicles.

As soon as they took the House in January, conservative Republicans introduced a bill that would sharply increase U.S. production of gas, oil and coal. It would also limit restrictions on pipelines and refineries. Needless to say, President Biden has said he would veto the bill should it pass the Senate.

But that’s not even the most dangerous right-wing effort to heat the planet faster. In January, Virginia’s GOP governor, Glenn Youngkin, announced that he had rejected Ford Motor Co.’s overtures about building an electric battery plant in his state. That’s because Ford has partnerships with Chinese companies, and its electric batteries must therefore be a communist plot.

Republicans once accepted the validity of science, but as they increasingly became the lap dogs of fossil-fuel interests, they also became vocal skeptics of the science of climate change. That skepticism — or hostility — has been enthusiastically adopted by the GOP base.

Chris Gloninger, an Iowa TV meteorologist, has resigned from his job because of threats he has received in response to his forecasts, which often cite the effects of a warming planet. One asked for his address and warned of an “Iowan welcome you will never forget.”

Yet, the consequences of climate change forecast by Butler and others — Marie Lu in “Legend,” the first of a young adult series, Kim Stanley Robinson in “The Ministry for the Future” — are no longer speculative. They’re upon us.

For days earlier this month, New York City was blanketed by a haze of smoke drifting south from Canadian wildfires. Right now, Texas is enduring a severe heat wave that is threatening its power grid. Temperatures in some parts of the state have broken records, and heat indexes (what the temperature feels like to the human body) have already topped 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

Much of the South is in the grip of extreme weather. The National Weather Service has issued heat alerts for not only Texas but also southern Louisiana and Mississippi. The severe heat, combined with high humidity, has fueled a series of thunderstorms and deadly tornadoes across northern Texas, Oklahoma and parts of the Lower Mississippi Valley.

The state of Arizona has capped new housing development around Phoenix, one of the nation’s fastest-growing metropolitan areas, because there simply isn’t enough water. The West has been in a severe drought for years now, and the extraordinary snowfall of last winter won’t do enough to ensure a water supply. The Colorado River Basin supplies water to 40 million people and fuels hydropower in eight states; experts say the snowpack has provided only a “year’s worth of breathing room.”

Still, human folly could doom any effort to stave off catastrophe. The artists among us have always understood our capacity for self-destruction.

Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.