Essay by Eric Worrall
The New Yorker claims big oil money started the US partisan climate policy split. But there is a better explanation.
How Did Fighting Climate Change Become a Partisan Issue?
Twenty years ago, Senator John McCain tried to spearhead an effort. What has happened to Republicans since then?
By Elizabeth Kolbert
August 14, 2022…
As a problem, climate change is as bipartisan as it gets: it will have equally devastating effects in red states as in blue. Last week, even as Kentucky’s two Republican senators—Rand Paul and the Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell—were voting against the I.R.A., rescuers in their state were searching for the victims of catastrophic floods caused by climate-change-supercharged rain. Meanwhile, most of Texas, whose two G.O.P. senators—Ted Cruz and John Cornyn—also voted against the bill, was suffering under “extreme” or “exceptional” drought.
How did caring about a drowned or desiccated future come to be a partisan issue? Perhaps the simplest answer is money. A report put out two years ago by the Senate Democrats’ Special Committee on the Climate Crisis noted, “In the 2000s, several bipartisan climate bills were circulating in the Senate.” Then, in 2010, the Supreme Court, in the Citizens United decision, ruled that corporations and wealthy donors could, effectively, pour unlimited amounts of cash into electioneering. Fossil-fuel companies quickly figured out how to funnel money through front groups, which used it to reward the industry’s friends and to punish its enemies. After Citizens United, according to the report, “bipartisan activity on comprehensive climate legislation collapsed.”
Even money, though, seems an insufficient explanation. The G.O.P.’s opposition to action on climate change has transcended crass calculation to become an article of faith. …
…
Read more: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/22/how-did-fighting-climate-change-become-a-partisan-issue
Money is most definitely an “insufficient explanation”, because for a long time there has been a great deal of money flowing from renewable actors to politicians, at least since President Carter installed solar panels on the White House in 1979. Supporting climate action is not exactly the political route to poverty. Nancy Pelosi’s son Paul, who allegedly has significant interests in Asian Lithium mines, is currently facing accusations of making money by leveraging his mother’s political position.
So what is the real explanation for the split between Democrats and Republicans over climate policy?
My personal favourite explanation is that Lord Monckton caused the split, by convincing Republicans that the climate movement is a Trojan Horse for communists and world government proponents. Monckton impressed the Republicans so much, they asked him to appear before the Congressional Energy and Environment Subcommittee in 2009.
Monckton was special advisor to Margaret Thatcher‘s UK Conservative Government between 1982 – 1986, and had a ringside seat during the period Thatcher raised the climate movement into an international priority, by speaking about the alleged climate threat on the world stage. Some have speculated Thatcher advanced the climate cause because she needed a political weapon to beat militant coal unions into submission, but few remember Thatcher was a qualified scientist. Thatcher’s graduate Chemistry dissertation was on X-Ray crystallography. She may have been genuinely concerned about CO2 emissions and global warming.
According to Monckton, the climate movement Thatcher championed subsequently morphed into a new home for anti-capitalists and the radical left.
The last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, showed up in the climate movement in 1993, when he founded Green Cross International, following the Rio Earth Summit in 1992.
I don’t know what influence Gorbachev had over the apparent transformation of the green movement, but as Soviet leader, Gorbachev was no friend of Capitalism. Gorbachev rejected Capitalism, even after it was obvious Deng Xiaoping’s limited but genuine Capitalist reforms were successfully reviving the Chinese Communist economy.
There are plenty of open anti-capitalists in today’s green movement.
Famous author Terry Pratchett once explained “in the bathtub of history, the truth is harder to hold than the soap, and much more difficult to find“. Any explanation of that complex time is riddled with assumptions, gaps and interpretations, including mine.
I’d love to read reader’s theories of how the split happened. I was very young when some of these events occurred, so I didn’t learn about most of these events until long after they happened. Maybe some of you were present in person when Lord Monckton presented his views to US Republicans.
Update (EW): h/t Chris Hanley – Transcript containing Lord Monckton’s presentation to Congress in 2009.
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“Seek truth from facts.”
“catastrophic floods caused by climate-change-supercharged rain.”
And right there all possibility of a rational, reasoned argument disappeared.
They make these dire climate change pronouncement with such confidence. When the truth is they have no idea what they are talking about. They couldn’t tell you how CO2 managed to supercharge a rain storm, if challenged, but proceed as though it is an established fact. Not science.
“even as Kentucky’s two Republican senators—Rand Paul and the Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell—were voting against the I.R.A., rescuers in their state were searching for the victims of catastrophic floods caused by climate-change-supercharged rain.”
As usual, the warmists use catastrophic language to describe fairly normal weather-related occurrences. Eastern Kentucky has always been flood prone. Every couple of years their is a major flood along the Ohio river and it’s dozens of little rivers, lakes and streams in the area. Take a look at all the squiggly blue lines on this watershed map, and then tell me why we should be surprised that Kentucky has oodles of floods.
https://sd1.org/ImageRepository/Document?documentID=239
Many rational people simply rejected the tales of CAGW doom, and the professed financial needs in trillions of the CAGW theorem to right earths balance. I’m not so certain that it is breaking along political lines. Though the most obvious true believers are of the far left, but that is true of so much of our social conversation. The far left being most hysterical on any social subject.
If the science had shown the need to reduce say Sulphur or the metals at the exhaust stack/pipe, I would have been all in. I fully support cleaning up where we can. However, IMHO CAGW was never about cleaning up what we could, except at the government and corporate trough. If you think that claim is mere skepticism you’ve never questioned the billions of dollars spent with zero decrease in the atmospheric CO2 level.
Al Gore let it slip early days when he said he wanted to redress the disparity between electric energy providers and the petroleum industry. I believe it was around the time he had heavily invested in GE.
I suppose if there seems to be a split at this date, it may be down to the many first in line believers now rejecting the CAGW theorem of doom after forty or so years of increasing alarmist hyperbole, and the even worse science of the end times prophecy.
There is nothing new about ” extreme” heat or a drought in Texas, or even floods in the Kentucky.
..rescuers in their state were searching for the victims of catastrophic floods caused by climate-change-supercharged rain. Meanwhile, most of Texas, […] ..was suffering under “extreme” or “exceptional” drought.
I you start with a false premise, it is easy to justify any proposal.
The question is for someone who hopes to be thought rational, does she really believe that nonsense?
Just plain ole politics. The Democrats pushed it because they had run out of other ideas for raising taxes and scaring the population. If the Democrats were pushing it, the Republicans were against it; they had their own scary agenda.
It’s not a coincidence that the global warming catastrophe reared its ugly head as the Soviet Union and East European communism were collapsing.
Most of them are quite open about their desire to get rid of capitalism.
I say we should believe them.
Anyone who talks about a “wealth tax” openly despises capitalism. They used to call for a “death tax” because the dead couldn’t complain. Now, they are so eager to take what ever they can, they don’t even care.
NYeT, New Yorker, your Ass is showing, it’s a crevasse. Abort two babies… fetuses, throw another on the barbie, sequester their carbon pollutants, and don’t spare her for a metal slab for #CecileTheClinicalCannibal.
There’s no real difference between Democrats and Republicans on the Green New Deal.
A clean Green New Deal bill would have probably gotten a lot of Republican votes.
The reason the Republicans didn’t vote for the Inflation Reduction Act is because of all the other wasteful spending in the bill.
If faced with giving the Green New Deal an up or a down vote, many Republicans would give it an up vote because they think CO2 is a problem that needs to be fixed. They are not prepared to challenge this mantra.
The only challenge they ever throw up is about costs, not about the basic concept that CO2 is bad and needs to be controlled. They incorrectly assume it is bad and it does need to be controlled.
No, it’s going to take about a decade or two of cooling while CO2 is rising to break this spell CO2 has on people, including Republican politicians.
It’s amazing how rich Democrats have gotten from “resisting offers of money.”
I just stare at this plot and wonder how anybody can think renewables solve the “FF problem.” How more obvious can it be? [From joannenova’s website].
FWIW, here is my take on the politics of climate change.
The split was planned and engineered by publicity paid for by investors who need big changes to happen to make more quick money.
Big newspapers are dominantly owned by a few people who like more money.
Scientific journals are mostly controlled by a few investors/owners, dominantly German.
A public fed a daily diet of any theme, helped by usual journalistic tricks like fearful hobgoblins will of course be largely led to believe in the new idea, because everyone does.
Add a hard touch of suppression of dissenting ideas (a good story has a villain) and if you do it well, you will have a populace eating out of your hand.
Take this compliance to the political overlords who these days control the major money flows for more research. Pay research that supports your political aims. Remember that politicians are poorly paid on entering politics but often end up departing richer out of all proportion.
Pretty soon, you have created an integrated industry whose prime aim is to distribute other people’s money into your own pockets. Having a political party on side is not vital, but it sure helps the money flow. Think subsidies. Think mandated preferences for some forms of electricity generation. All political, all engineered to make that big money flow certain ways.
Over time, unrelenting media spin causes even major political parties to believe, so the split between parties lessens. The manipulation continues in ways that enhance the money flow. Geoff S
Just from personal experience of designing large structures, which always takes in to account the climate, I became interested in the Global Warming phenomenon and read around it. Didn’t take long to become a skeptic because whatever was going on today was no different from the past according to all the data I had to use.
When the terrifying predictions of climate doom came along with the only “cure” presented was global energy poverty leading to actual global poverty managed by socialism that was it. I still read around the topic, thanks in part to wattsupwiththat.com, and so far nothing has convinced me that doom awaits unless I become a socialist. However what is very obvious is the hulking monetary behemoth all aspects of the Climate Change industry has become and that’s what drives its relentless advance into every aspect of life now. Rationing, of everything, seems inevitable unless you are Davos Man and I am not a member of that club.
Oh, and all of my structures are still standing, some for over 50 years.
Many of the ‘scienbtists” from the skeptics community seem to be supporters of big corporations, big oil, and tobacco companies. I think that a big part of the divide happened when these skeptics either took money or think that they will get money and fame.