A Sea in Flames - Carl Safina [33]
Senator John Kerry, one of the first sponsors of the Senate’s energy bill, back before the blowout, seems to share such sentiments. He believes America is confronting three interrelated crises: an energy security crisis, a climate crisis, and an economic crisis. He says our best response to all three “is a bold, comprehensive bill that accelerates green innovation and creates millions of new jobs as we develop and produce the next generation of renewable power sources, alternative fuels and energy-efficient cars, homes and workplaces.”
But ironically, because some Republican governors—such as Florida’s Charlie Crist and California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger—are withdrawing support for expanding drilling off their coasts, Republican support for an energy bill—wafer thin at its apogee—is dissolving faster than dispersant-drenched oil. Obama paid the price of reaching for that support by opening new areas, but the blowout has coastal politicians shrinking back in horror. The bill dies. Most proponents say the bill in Congress had been decorated with so many gifts and compromises that it had become a bad bill anyway. That’s an apt balm. It was like the bill had eaten so much fat that it collapsed of arterial blockage.
Even though it’s a matter of physics that carbon dioxide makes the planet warmer, and even though, because of burning oil and coal, our atmosphere now contains a third more carbon dioxide (and climbing) than it did at the start of the Industrial Revolution, many people just won’t believe we have a big problem. People have a lot of kooky notions, but many who are disconnected from reality on this issue are running or aspiring to run the government of the United States of America.
Ron Johnson, a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate from the great dairy state of Wisconsin, doesn’t “believe” that carbon dioxide is causing climate change, “not by any stretch of the imagination.” With his head still in his dairy air, he’s going to Washington. In a few months, Johnson, steeped in tea party support, will beat Democratic incumbent Russ Feingold. “I think it’s far more likely,” Johnson opines of the causes for global warming, “that it’s just sunspot activity.”
When U.S. senators are offering the same explanation for climate change that were used to explain UFOs in the 1950s—watch out.
Here is a real conservative, one I admire: Congressman Bob Inglis, Republican of South Carolina:
As a Republican, I believe that we should be talking about conservation, because that’s our heritage. If you go back to Teddy Roosevelt, that’s who we are. And after all, there are very few letters different between conservatism and conservation. People asked me if I believe in climate change. And I tell them, no, I don’t believe in climate change. It’s not big enough to be a matter of faith. My faith informs my reaction to the data. But the data shows that there is climate change and that it stands to reason that it is in part human caused. And so, therefore, as responsible moral agents, we should act as stewards. Unfortunately, a clear majority of the Republican conference does not accept human causation in climate change. It’s definitely not within the orthodoxy of conservatism as presented by, you know, Sarah Palin and folks like her. So you don’t want to stand against that. And the result is that some people are sort of cowed into silence.…
It’s really about national security. We are dependent for oil on the region of the world that doesn’t like us very much. We need to change the game there. It’s also about free enterprise, letting the free enterprise system actually solve this problem. Right now, the reason that free enterprise can’t solve the problem is that petroleum and coal have freebies. Accountability, by the way, is a very bedrock conservative concept, even a biblical concept. We insist on accountability. So do we want