Not so very long ago some people were calling climate change the signature issue of our time, the most urgent of urgent tasks, a crisis our leaders in Washington absolutely had to do something about right friggin' yesterday. The same people are still saying it. But yesterday has come and gone. And what happened? A Google search on the subject will give you umpty-ump million results. Congress gave us exactly zero.
Energy-and-climate blogger Dave Roberts and illustrator Thomas Pitilli, with the help of Warp Graphics, have produced a tragicomic about the whole sordid affair in six acts. Here's one of them. You can see the rest here.
Click for a larger version.
The best hope for a climate bill was the 1400-pager that came out of the House of Representatives all the way back in June 2009. It was far from perfect, and it didn't even include the words "climate change" in the title, but it contained some reasonably far-sighted elements. Which, of course, gave the Senate palpitations, and, eventually the legislative equivalent of cardiac arrest. Despite prodigious compromises with Republicans who had no intention of voting for the final product anyway, the bill went comatose and then died.
The new House of Representatives is anything but the best hope for climate-change legislation. Some 55 percent of the incoming Republican caucus are climate-change deniers, and not a single one of the GOP freshmen in the House have publicly stated agreement with the scientific consensus that greenhouse gases are a threat to national security, a threat to the oceans and all that live in it, and a threat to many terrestrial creatures, including human beings. You can count on them with their 49-seat majority to do all in their power not only to keep climate-change legislation from coming anywhere near the floor for debate, but also to do their utmost to squelch the EPA in its Supreme Court-approved effort to curtail greenhouse gas emissions.
From John Boehner to Darrell Issa, who wants to run a fourth congressional investigation into thrice-debunked claims that scientists have manipulated data to show evidence of global warming, the new House leaders are beyond clownish in their pronouncements about climate change. Said a post-election Boehner in November to ABC's George Stephanopoulous: “The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen, that it is harmful to our environment, is almost comical.”
Yikes and a half. That's enough cluelessness to bring me to tears, Mr. Speaker.
With so-called moderate Fred Upton (MI-06) heading up the Energy and Commerce Committee, two hard-core climate deniers have been assigned to chair subcommittees that will make EPA staffers' lives miserable for the next two years. As chief of the Subcommittee on Energy and Power, there's Kentucky Rep. Ed Whitfield (KY-01) coal-industry proponent and foe of EPA curbs on greenhouse gases, among other things the agency is charged with. Then there's Rep. John Shimkus (IL-19), a climate-change denier who will chair the made-especially-for-him Subcommittee on Environment and Economy. No doubt making the majority of Christians cringe, Shimkus challenged the idea that climate change poses real dangers by invoking Genesis 8:22 during congressional hearings in 2009: “'As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease.' ... There is a theological debate that this is a carbon-starved planet, not too much carbon.”
Uh-huh. Could Shimkus point to the verse where God says King Coal will be with us as long as the earth shall endure? We already know it will be with us as long as climate-change deniers are running interference for their fossil-fuel buddies.
Magnifico has a diary about how the media forgot climate change in 2010.