We cannot become inured to the sheer terribleness of what passes for standard conservative politics these days. Trump or no Trump, individuals like Scott Pruitt, now the head of our Environmental Protection Agency despite—no, because of—a history of slavish devotion to industries he now regulates, have long displayed a contempt for the public and a reliance on propaganda as a tool of governance.
“To have any kind of focus on the cause and effect of the storm versus helping people, or actually facing the effect of the storm, is misplaced,” Mr. Pruitt said ahead of Hurricane Irma, echoing similar sentiments he made when Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas two weeks earlier. “To use time and effort to address it at this point is very, very insensitive to this people in Florida,” he added.
But of course he said the same thing both before Harvey hit and after, and before either of them hit Pruitt was already of the opinion that government and the press and the scientific community shouldn't talk about climate change at all until he, Scott Pruitt, was able to put together a team of fellow cranks and lobbyists to publicly argue once again with the scientists in some sort of final battle royale to see which side's quips and knowing smirks would decide the fate of the planet for once and for all. His own public opinion has been that it doesn't matter whether decades of science have firmly established both a pattern of climate change and the specific human activities that have caused it; he simply doesn't believe the world's scientists, period.
Ask him just when he or the United States government should set aside time to make contingency plans for the climate change that will be unavoidably continuing for the next century regardless of our actions, much less plotting how to reduce those climate changes to anything less than catastrophic levels, and his answer will continue to be the same: Not now. Not soon. Not while he has anything to say about it.
Talking about climate change while experiencing that climate change firsthand is, of course, important. The effect of shifting winds and warmer ocean water may indeed be to make major hurricanes of the caliber of Harvey and Irma—larger, warmer, and wetter—more commonplace. Are we all right with that? Should towns like Houston or Tampa be doing something—anything—to defend against it? Imagine an Irma-caliber storm hitting Florida in a future decade when local sea levels are just six inches higher: How would the outcome change?
It is already nearly impossible to evacuate a city the size of Houston. Should we continue to try? What of flood insurance programs—are we resigned to building the same structures in the same places that we know, for a fact, will suffer worse in future decades?
There is something deeply sociopathic about demanding those questions not be asked, and never be asked. To feign anger when those questions are asked, and brush them all aside with the declaration that the rest of the world's facts have no more or less bearing than your own personal beliefs, is the mark of a fool. The Republican Party needs to stop elevating their village idiots to the party's top ranks, but there seems no path available for that to happen. The party takes genuine pride in dismissing issue experts, scientific experts, historians and, indeed, anyone who has devoted their life to learning anything about anything, in favor of a pseudo-mystic belief that sufficient ideological posturing will bend all those other realities to the movement's liking.
The problem isn't that individual Republican leaders are or are not uninformed about climate change. The problem is that the party has adopted anti-intellectualism as its creed and motto; from Trump to Ryan to McConnell to Pruitt to Perry to take-your-pick, in-depth knowledge is seen as the purview of "elites" who should be distrusted simply because they are not members of the movement. And they have steadfastly purged anyone in their ranks who dares think otherwise.