In a 51 page 2009 report for American Progress, http://www.americanprogress.org/... Ruy Teixeira outlines why changing demographics, geography, and public attitudes mean that Democrats will be running the show, especially with regard to controlling Congress, for the next 20 to 30 years.
I have combined his findings with the realities of climate change and the 2008 global economic collapse to conclude that the Republican Party, as we know it, is finished. I haven’t written the economic section or conclusion yet, but here is my basic thesis, a summary of Teixeira’s findings and the climate threat section. I hope that reading this will give you optimism, based on knowledge, and encourage you to advocate for killing the filibuster and help finish off the Republican Party this November.
Note: I extensively cited Teixeira's facts in my Word document, but the footnotes did not survive the html conversion here. You can assume that virtually all of the facts in the sections before climate change are from Judis and Teixeira's works.
The Evolution from Conservative Republicanism to
Progressive Democraticism in American Politics, (Parts I & II)
Introduction
In politics, there are cycles and evolutionary progressions. One example of these cycles is the back and forth swing between Democratic and Republican party dominance in U.S. party politics. 1860 saw the election of Abraham Lincoln and the beginning of a Republican era that lasted until 1932. This era was followed by a 48 year Democratic era that began with Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. It was eventually replaced by a Republican era that ran from 1980 until 2008, when it appears to have ended with the election of Barack Obama on the heels of the Democratic Party takeover of Congress in 2006. There are also evolutionary progressions wherein a political ideology, often representing an entire system of government and social organization, becomes so incapable of addressing societal and political challenges that it is completely and irrevocably replaced by a new or competing ideology deemed better suited to meet those challenges. The transitions from small tribal societies in Europe to the fuedal system of lords, vassals, and fiefs that thereafter evolved into more centralized monarchies and, in turn, were replaced by representative democracies are examples of these evolutionary ideological progressions.
Based on an analysis of demographic, geographic and public opinion trends during the last several decades, John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira concluded in their 2002 book The Emerging Demographic Majority that the Conservative era that began in 1980 with Ronald Reagan would before 2010 be replaced by a new Progressive era that the authors predicted would last several decades. While Judis and Teixeira predicted merely the evidence and timing for the next cyclical swing in American political ideology and policies, two major historical events that occurred four and six years after the publishing of their findings presage a far more substantial shift that seems likelier to manifest the characteristics of a political evolutionary progression than a political cycle.
The first of these events was the international release of former vice president Al Gore’s Oscar winning documentary on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth. Although the climate crisis had received its first major thrust into public consciousness in 1988 when James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, appeared before Congress to warn them of the rapidly growing threat to human civilization that was looming as a result of dangerously high levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, it was not until Gore’s film premiered in 2006 that an American public that had become ecologically complacent since Reagan began dismantling the nation’s environmental protection regulations suddenly reawaked with an informed sense of urgency regarding the threats posed by our warming climate.
The huge and likely insurmountable problem for the Republican Party is that their Conservative political and economic ideology, distrustful of science and government intervention, and wedded to defending the big business interests that will by absolute necessity bow to unprecedented levels of government constraints and regulations, was not designed to address a crisis as needful of a strong and sustained central command as demanded by our climate crisis. This problem, however, extends far beyond the principles and policies of Conservative ideology. Equally challenging for the Republican Party will be the Conservative mindset that has been burned into the Republican brain over the last century, and threatens to render both Conservative politicians and their constituencies psychologically incapable of abandoning their cherished political beliefs, even when continuing to maintain those beliefs amounts to political suicide. The third, and probably most influential, factor irrevocably destroying any chance the Republican Party of today might ever have of regaining influence in American politics is that the political demands posed by the climate crisis will continue, and very likely grow in scope and urgency, through the remaining nine decades of the twenty-first century. Neither Conservative ideology nor Conservative psychology, locked into a trust of the past that necessitates an accompanying contempt for change, possesses the basic values and principles by which to successfully address those decades-long demands. Thus, similarly to how our presumably Progressive Founding Fathers were compelled to craft a system of government fundamentally and profoundly different from that of the British Monarchy, politicians today must craft a new government/business relationship fundamentally and profoundly different from that reflected by the free market-dominated status quo, while the intellectual elite of a Conservative ideology now destined for extinction must eventually craft a new political and economic ideology fundamentally and profoundly different from the Conservatism of the last century. This transformation will be neither easy nor swift.
In fact, on its own, the decades long demands that climate change will impose on our American government, and the fact that they can be met only by massive government control and regulation over the private sector, bodes a sure and relatively quick death to Republican Conservatism. However, that human civilization-scale survival challenge is not the only monumental, and, indeed, historical, force now bearing down on Conservative ideology and forbidding any future prospect for the political resurgence of the Republican Party, as we know it. The 2008 global economic meltdown poses a threat to the Republican Party that is also independently in the process of denying a future to the foundation of Conservative economic ideology, and in the process of ultimately rendering inconsequential a Republican Party so irrationally intransigent as to continue defending the insidiously destructive Conservative sans-regulatory principles and policies at the heart of that meltdown.
Before exploring in detail exactly how and why climate change and the 2008 global recession, both on their own and as a tandem force, unequivocally spell doom for a Republican Party politically and psychologically unable to abandon its Conservative ideas, we will explore the demographic, geographic and public opinion trends that forebode this fate for Conservative Republicanism. We will conclude with an exploration of what principles and policies might form the basis of the political party which will eventually replace today’s Republican Party, and what Conservative principles may live on to influence whatever new party emerges to challenge the Progressive Democraticism destined to rule for at least the next three decades, and probably well into the unforeseeable future.
The Democratic-Trending Demography
In 2002, Judis and Teixeira observed strong and growing demographic, geographic and public opinion trends that during the next several decades seem destined to result in larger local, state and national Democratic Party gains, and corresponding gains in Progressive ideals, policies, and programs. The strong demographic shift toward progressives they observed includes almost all of the major demographic groups that are growing fastest. These groups include professionals, women, minorities, and the white working class. Seven years later, in 2009, Teixeira updated his earlier results in a 51-page report for the Center for American Progress titled "New Progressive America; Twenty Years of Demographic, Geographic, and Attitudinal Changes Across the Country Herald a New Progressive Majority." This new analysis reaffirmed Judis and Teixeira’s 2002 conclusions, and provided additional data describing an increased pace in America’s shift toward progressive ideology. His paper also added young voters as perhaps the most telling and influential demographic group presaging a new Democratic era.
During the 1950s college educated highly skilled professionals such as doctors, lawyers and teachers were the most dependable demographic group for the Republican Party. This group, which in the fifties comprised only 7 percent of the workforce, has by 2009 grown to 17 percent. They have the highest turnout rate of any group, and by 2000 they comprised about 21 percent of voters nationwide. The problem for Republicans is that while this group overwhelmingly supported Eisenhower and Nixon, and strongly supported Ford and Reagan, they supported Gore over Bush in 2000 by 52 percent to 44 percent, Kerry over Bush in 2004 by 55 to 44 percent, and Obama over McCain in 2008 by 58 to 40 percent.
Decades ago women also overwhelmingly supported Republicans over Democrats. For example in 1956, women voted for Eisenhower by 63-37 percent (while men supported him by 56-43 percent). By the 1980s that trend had reversed, and in 2008, women voted for Obama by 56 to 43 percent (while men supported him by 49 to 48 percent). Moreover, while in 1970, single women comprised only 38 percent of all women, they now make up 47 percent of all adult women, and their growth rate is double that of married women. The problem for Republicans is that in 2008 single women voted for Obama over McCain by 70 to 29 percent.
Minorities will also present a growing problem for the Republican Party. While in 1960 almost one third of Blacks voted for Nixon, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the National Voting Rights Act of 1965 represented major transformative events, and by 1964 fully 94 percent of Blacks voted for Johnson. The level of Democratic support among Blacks has remained very high with 95 percent voting for Obama in 2008. This trend is further amplified by the growth of Blacks as a percentage of all voters. In 1960, Blacks comprised fewer than 6 percent of the electorate. By 2008, their numbers had more than doubled to 13 percent. A similar and even stronger trend is seen with Hispanic voters. While as many as 47 percent of Hispanics voted for Reagan in 1984, in 2008, 67 percent of Hispanics voted for Obama. Moreover, while in 1992, Hispanics comprised only 3.7 percent of the voting electorate, in 2008 that number had risen to 9 percent.
The strong and growing minority trend toward Democrats, and the huge problem it creates for the Republican party, is most clearly seen by contrasting the past and current African-American, Hispanic and Asian voting populations with population projections for the coming decades. In 1988, minorities comprised 15 percent of the national electorate. By 2008, that number had grown to 26 percent. As the minority share of the total population grows from roughly one third in 2008 to a projected 54 percent in 2050 we can expect much greater minority influence within the national electorate during the next several decades.
The white working class, or those without a college degree, comprise a relatively large demographic group representing about 39 percent of the total electorate in 2008. Between the years of F.D.R.’s New Deal in 1932 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, this group voted heavily Democratic. In the 1960s, they shifted dramatically toward the Republicans, and only began returning to the Democrats during the 1990s. Nonetheless, they are still predominantly Republican, and voted for McCain over Obama in 2008 by an 18 point margin. The good news for Democrats is that this group is steadily becoming a smaller segment of the overall electorate. Since 1988, it has been declining at a rate of about three quarters of a percentage point each year, and is down 15 points over the last twenty years. The decline in white working class voters is expected to continue as the current upgrading in education progresses, and the group will likely lose an additional six points by 2020.
As noted, Judis and Teixeira’s 2002 analysis neglected to include the influence of young voters, however, Teixeira’s 2009 update found this group to be trending strongly Democratic and an increasingly decisive influence in future elections. Born between 1978 and 2000, and referred to by Teixeira as the "Millennial Generation," this demographic group gave Kerry only a 9-point advantage in 2004. Four years later, however, the group voted for Obama by 66 to 32, or a margin of 34 points.
Equally importantly, while Millennials comprised only 20 percent of the total electorate in 2008, their turnout between 2004 and 2008 increased by over four percentage points; a turnout increase rate four times the national average. More bad news for Republicans is that the voting age members of this Millennial group is increasing by about 4.5 million each year, and by 2020, voting age Millennials will make up almost 40 percent of the electorate. And this 40 percent Democratic Millinnial electorate will be further amplified by the attrition of older voters who tended to vote Republican as strongly as Millennials now vote Democratic.
The strong and growing trend of Millennials toward the Democratic Party most clearly describes the end of the Reagan Conservative Republican Era because whereas there is substantial overlap in similar trends of the other demographic groups, Millennials are comprised of all non-age-related demographic groups combined. That Millennials who in 2008 voted for Obama over McCain by a two-to-one margin will comprise 40 percent of the electorate by 2020 singularly bodes disaster for the Republican Party. When we, as we will in subsequent sections, factor in that of all groups Millennials will be most effected by the threat of climate change and very strongly effected by whatever Progressive remedies to the 2008 global recession are required, we see even more clearly why today’s Republican Party is truly on its last legs.
The Democratic-Trending Geography
Professionals, women, minorities, the white working class, and Millennials are all trending steadily Democratic. But demographics are not the only way to describe the problems Republicans and their Conservative ideology face during the coming decades. The geography of the Country is also trending steadily Democratic and Progressive. Judis and Teixeira see a new political geography defined by metropolitan regions within states rather than by states. They coined the term "ideopolises" to label these new Democratic geographic strongholds, and describe them as postindustrial metropolises that specialize more in the production of ideas and services rather than in assembly-line manufacturing.
While in 1992, 1996 and 2000, Democrats dominated states in the Northeast, upper Midwest and Pacific Northwest, winning 267 of the 270 electoral votes needed for victory with these ideopolises, they are now extending their reach into Republican territory in the South and Southwest. Judis and Teixeira predicted in 2002 that by 2008 Democrats could rely on these ideopolises to win 332 electoral votes, or 148 electoral votes more than they would need to win the White House. By winning 365 electoral votes in 2008, Obama actually surpassed this prediction by 33 votes. Such is the extent of the electoral lock the Democrats seem poised to command during the coming decades.
In his 2009 update, Teixeira used a more traditional geographical analysis and found similar evidence for a strong and lasting Democratic majority. He noted that the fastest growing and largest metropolitan areas were almost all strongly trending Democratic. Republican gains, on the other hand, were limited to stable or declining rural areas. Furthermore, these trends are expected to continue and intensify during the next several decades. For example, as the U.S. population gains about 100 million by 2037, the bulk of this growth will take place in those large Democratic-trending metropolitan areas.
The Democratic-Trending Attitudes
The changing American demography and huge geographic Democratic gains in recent battleground and traditional Republican states reveal the shift in political power from Republicans to Democrats. These trends, however, do not occur outside of a public attitudes context that drives voters toward either Democrats or Republicans on major political issues. It is the nature and extent of these Democratic-leaning public attitudes among the general electorate, and especially among the demographic and geographic groups most strongly trending Democratic, that explain the current political realignment and signal a coming evolutionary transition rather than a Progressive-Conservative cycle.
Judis and Teixeira’s 2002 analysis found that the culture war issues like gay rights, race, abortion and gun control that played a pivotal role in the Conservative era beginning in 1980 had lost much of their steam by 2000. By 2009, Teixeira’s updated analysis reported strong evidence that the Country now has a new agenda, and that it’s major concerns like active government, health care, clean energy, diplomacy-based national security, and education are Progressive issues that pull the electorate toward Democratic policies and candidates.
Teixeira cites the rise in Millennial Generation voters, and single and non-religious adults, with their more tolerant attitudes, and the decline in the white working class as the main reasons for what appears destined to be a steadily growing shift in those public attitudes. One example of this powerful and growing Progressive shift is that 58 percent of Millennials approve of gay marriage while 60 percent of older Americans disapprove. In the coming decades, simple cohort replacement will account for much of this historic evolution from Conservative to Progressive ideology and government.
Millennials, minorities and women voters all have a much more favorable view of the role of government in improving the lives of Americans. Thus, according to Pew Research, while in 1994, 59 percent of Americans agreed with the statement "the government should guarantee every citizen enough to eat and a place to sleep," by 2007 that number had grown to 69 percent. And while in 1994, 57 percent of Americans agreed that "it is the responsibility of the government to take care of people who can’t take care of themselves." By 2007 that number also climbed to 69 percent. This "active government" stance also appears in a recent poll by the Progressive Studies Program where 79 percent of respondents felt that "government investments in education, infrastructure, and science are necessary to ensure America’s long-term economic growth" while only 9 percent disagreed.
Americans have also come to strongly favor major health care reform. President Obama’s decision to focus on an historic overhaul of the nation’s health care system during his first year in office is strongly connected to the public demand for such action. A February 2009 CBS News/ New York Times poll found that after the economy, health care reform earned more public support than any other initiative by a 13 point margin.
Now almost three decades after the environmental deregulation and systematic disempowering of the Environmental Protection Agency that began with Reagan, Americans are rallying behind the need to transition from high CO2 content energy to cleaner alternative fuels. Clearly, Al Gore’s 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, is responsible for much of the new concern for our environment. After years of environmental issues taking a back seat to almost all other issues, a 2007 CBS News/New York Times poll found that 87 percent of respondents favored alternative energy sources and only 9 percent opposed these initiatives.
Education has also climbed to the top of voter concerns, and this development will work against Republicans and Conservative ideology. As we saw in the demographics section, voters who become better educated are far more likely to shift their support from Republicans to Democrats. Perhaps this correlation is behind the Conservative reluctance to increase funding for education, but with American students lagging behind students from other countries in science and math, stronger government support for education will be vital to America’s continuing competitiveness within the global economy. The problem for the Republican Party is that public support for this increased spending has soared over the last several decades. While in 1973, 47 percent of Americans felt that their government was spending too little on education, by 2006 that sentiment had fallen to 26 percent. And the prospect of higher taxes does not weaken this new commitment to education. Republican politicians wishing to scrimp in this area of national policy will have an increasingly uphill battle.
In 2009 Judis also found a growing shift from military to diplomatic solutions to national security. He cites a February 2009 poll by Democracy Corp showing that 82 percent of Americans rated "restoring respect for America in the world as a moral leader, restoring our key alliances, and putting more emphasis on diplomacy" as extremely or very important to President Obama’s foreign policy. This growing emphasis on diplomacy is also reflected in very strong support for the U.S. participating in treaties to prohibit nuclear weapons and address climate change.
Judis and Teixeira’s 2002 and Teixeira’s 2009 demographic, geographic, and attitudinal evidence strongly suggest that America is moving into a new Progressive Democratic era. The authors do not go as far as describing this political shift as an evolutionary progression from Conservative Republicanism to Progressive Democraticism, presumably because they omitted from their analysis the anticipated effect that climate change will have on the political landscape for the rest of the century. While Teixeira does cite environmental and clean energy concerns in his 2009 update, he does not take into account that these concerns will be top political priorities for at least the next five decades, and that addressing climate change through massive government regulation will be absolutely necessary. In the next section, we will explore climate change and its challenges in more detail, and describe why this issue alone has the power to marginalize Conservative Republican political and economic influence in American politics not only during the rest of the twenty-first century, but more likely for good.
The Climate Threat
To understand why the Republican Party, with its dominant Conservative ideology, will be unable to address the political challenges posed by climate change during the next five decades and beyond, and will, unless it undergoes a profound transformation, become largely irrelevant to American politics over the next decade, we must appreciate the various threats climate change poses, what the world must do to mitigate and adapt to those threats, and the indifferent and unyielding tendencies of Conservative Republicans. Before we consider the threats and recommended responses, we should understand them within the context of the various sources upon which we rely for their assessment.
In 1988, the United Nations established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to assess the nature and extent of climate change, and to recommend policies and procedures for its mitigation and adaptation. It is currently comprised of over 3,000 scientists from 194 countries, and has issued assessment reports on climate change in 1990, 1995, 2001, and 2007. Its next published assessment is scheduled for 2014. While the IPCC does not conduct climate research of its own, its scientists evaluate the entire body of scientific evidence on climate change published in the most respected peer-reviewed scientific journals throughout the world. It is important to understand that the IPCC is a consensus organization, which means that its published findings must be approved by each of the 194 member countries, with every country having veto power over the publishing of any and all specific findings. Having to gain acceptance by each of the largest greenhouse gas emitting countries like the United States, China, and India as well as the major oil producing countries, its assessments have been characterized as highly conservative. Referring to the IPCC Third Assessment Report published in 2007, Scientific American, for example, noted that "after objections by Saudi Arabia and China, the report dropped a sentence stating that the impact of human activity on the earth's heat budget exceeds that of the sun by fivefold. ‘The difference is really a factor of 10,’ says lead author Piers Forster of the University of Leeds in England."
In 2007, the IPCC, then comprised of over 2,000 scientists from 154 countries, concluded that by 2100 the world’s surface temperature is expected to rise by 3 degrees Celsius over its 1750 pre-industrial level. It recommended that CO2-eq emissions be reduced 80-95 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 in order to achieve a 50/50 likelihood of averting a 450 parts per million (ppm) C0 atmospheric CO2 concentration level that would cause a surface temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius over the pre-industrial level.
According to a September 19, 2007 article in The Independent, (U.K.), the IPCC’s conservative predictions for such a 2-degree rise include the following major consequences:
"Africa: Between 350 and 600 million people will suffer water shortages or increased competition for water. Yields from agriculture could fall by half by 2020.
Asia: Up to a billion people will suffer water shortages as supplies dwindle with the melting of Himalayan glaciers.
Australia/New Zealand: Water supplies will no longer be guaranteed in parts of southern and eastern Australia by 2030.
Europe: Water availability will drop in the south by up to a quarter. Heatwaves, forest fires and extreme weather events such as flash floods will be more frequent. New diseases will appear.
Latin America: Up to 77 million people will face water shortages and tropical glaciers will disappear. Tropical forests will become savanna.
North America: Economic damage from extreme weather events such as Hurricane Katrina will continue increasing.
Polar regions: The seasonal thaw of permafrost will increase by 15 per cent and the overall extent of the permafrost will shrink by about 20 per cent."
The effects of a 3-degree rise, which is the expected outcome if the world fulfills only the pledges made at the 2009 Copenhagen conference on climate change, include a 23-foot rise in sea level . That 70 percent of the world’s population resides in coastal plains highlights the impact that a 23-foot rise in global sea level will have on human civilization.
As dire as those environmental threats seem, they will likely pale in comparison to threats from the geo-political de-stabilization that will result as countries suffer collapsed economies and battle over dwindling resources. In April, 2007, the U.S. Army War College’s Military Advisory Board published a report titled "The National Security Implications of Global Climate Change," which concluded the following: "Many developing nations do not have the government and social infrastructures in place to cope with the type of stressors that could be brought about by global climate change...When a government can no longer deliver services to its people, ensure domestic order, and protect the nation's borders from invasion, conditions are ripe for turmoil, extremism and terrorism to fill the vacuum." Without serious climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts to address these dangers, the United States and other developed countries will likely fall victim to a climate change-driven eco-terrorism exponentially more widespread and devastating than that waged by Al Queda and other radical Islamic terrorist organizations.
Many of the climate-driven events that threaten political de-stabilization throughout the world are not merely forecasts; they are already happening. Such events include European desertification, a world-wide surge in diseases, rapidly shrinking coral reefs, lower global staple-crop yields, deadly heat waves, epochal ocean acidification, global increase in wildfires, rapid glacial melting, global ecosystem disruption, accelerated permafrost thawing, record tornadoes, Amazon rainforest tree species composition changes, ocean salinity changes, weakening of the Atlantic Gulf Stream, increasingly rapid sea level rise, major phytoplankton decrease, and accelerating species extinction.
Several months after An Inconvenient Truth premiered in 2006, Nicholas Stern, a former world bank economist commissioned by the British government to assess the economic impacts of climate change published a 700 page report concluding that unless the world began soon to spend approximately one percent of its annual G.D.P. on mitigation and adaptation measures, the world would risk shrinking the global G.D.P by as much as 20 percent.
In that same pivotal year of 2006, British scientist James Lovelock, who in the 1960s discovered what he called the "Gaia" hypothesis describing the Earth as a giant super-organism of interacting and interdependent eco-systems, and whose work established the foundation for the subsequent hypotheses that raising CO2 levels could profoundly change the character of the Earth’s climate, published his book Revenge of Gaia (after the Greek goddess Gaia personifying the Earth). Lovelock’s assessment of the climate change threat is encapsulated in the preface of that book where he writes, "We are in a fool’s climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over, billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the artic region where the climate remains tolerable." In his An Inconvenient Truth documentary, Gore placed Lovelock’s warning on the pessimistic end of scientific assessments, however ever-improving research methodology and findings since Revenge of Gaia was published are validating Lovelock’s prediction.
For example, in September 2006, The Associated Press reported that methane, which converts to CO2 as it is released from thawing permafrost, is entering the atmosphere at a rate five times faster than previously expected. In November 2006, Reuters reported that tropical peat bogs, which comprise about three percent of the Earth’s surface and store 2 trillion tons of CO2, had been completely omitted by scientists from the global greenhouse gas calculus. In December 2006, National Geographic News reported that sea levels could rise 40 percent higher than previously predicted, in part because artic sea is melting twice as fast as shown by climate models. In February 2007, The Guardian (U.K.) reported that the likelihood of ice sheet losses which would ultimately raise sea levels by 13 to 20 feet had gone from a 2001 prediction of "very low" to a 2007 prediction of 50/50. In May 2007, The Christian Science Monitor reported that the CO2 absorbing capacity of continents and oceans had been greatly overestimated.
The most ominous new development that renders Lovelock’s dire prediction unavoidable without an extraordinary amount of luck and sustained international cooperation also came in 2007. In that year, James Hansen announced that the IPCC’s recent Third Assessment Report had seriously miscalculated as 450 ppm the threshold level of atmospheric CO2 concentration that our world must remain under by 2050 if we are to safely avoid a Lovelockian future. Keeping in mind that the CO2 level in 2007 stood at approximately 385 ppm and is increasing at an annual rate of over 2 ppm, Hansen’s 2007 announcement that to avoid a meltdown of civilization, we must by 2050 get to and remain below 350 ppm of atmospheric CO2, gives us a mind-numbingly clear understanding of exactly how huge a threat the climate crisis poses.
New developments since Hansen’s 350 ppm announcement reveal that the magnitude of the climate crisis threat extends even beyond the ramifications of that revised benchmark. In April 2008, Reuters News Service reported that a third of the world’s large ocean regions are warming two to four times as fast as previous average temperatures predicted. Also that April, Nicolas Stern announced that his 2006 economic assessment had underestimated both the probabilities of temperature increases and the damage those increases would cost, and doubled from one to two percent of global GDP the amount it would cost to address it. In June 2008, the International Whaling Commission reported that coastal oxygen starved zones have increased by one third since 2006. Also that June, a study published in the British science journal Nature reported that the world’s oceans had warmed 50 percent more over the last 40 years than previous research had detected. That same month the Centre for Ice and Climate at the Neils Bohr Institute of the University of Copenhagen highlighted the non-linear and potentially abrupt nature of climate change, and the danger our world faces in not doing enough about it soon enough, by reporting that Greenland ice core evidence reveals that approximately 15,000 years ago global temperatures soared by 22 degrees Fahrenheit within 50 years. Finally, in December 2009, NPR.org reported that the U.S. Pentagon has officially classified global warming a national security threat.
The preceding extensive description of the nature, magnitude and demands of the climate crisis is the first of two components necessary to understanding why a Republican Party dominated by Conservative ideology is destined to become extinct within two decades at the very latest. The Republican Party’s historical and current response to past environmental threats and climate change is the second component foretelling the fate of that political party and its Conservative ideology.
Rachael Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, which described the dangers of pesticides like DDT, is considered to have initiated the modern environmental movement. This new movement seemed to enjoy broad bi-partisan support. The first major bill to follow Carson’s book, The Air Quality Control Act of 1967, passed without any dissenting votes in Congress, and the subsequent National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, passed the Senate by voice vote and the House over the objection of only 15 Representatives. Congressional attempts to strengthen that legislation through the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972 succeeded only with the over-ride of President Nixon’s veto. Congress went on to pass the Endangered Species Act of 1973 and the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1977, which ordered American car manufacturers to comply with new emissions standards, with broad bi-partisan support.
However, the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 marked the end of Republican stewardship of the planet and the beginning of a Republican assault on the environment that may arguably have turned global warming from a manageable environmental concern to the extremely unmanageable crisis that now threatens the whole of human civilization. While many of his attempts to dismantle environmental protections, such as cutting the Environmental Protection Agency, (EPA), budget by 25 percent and rolling back the Clean Air Act’s and the Clean Water Act’s pollution standards, were defeated by Congress, Reagan succeeded in various other areas like gutting funding for renewable energy programs, stifling EPA’s enforcement efforts, and issuing oil, gas and coal development leases on tens of millions of acres of national land.
George H.W. Bush’s record on the environment, although better than that of Reagan, was more reflective of the Republican Party’s assault on, rather than stewardship of, the environment. Although Bush Sr. passed the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990, his newly created Council on Competitiveness sided with big business on environmental issues and redefined the meaning of "wetlands," reducing them in size to appease farmers and developers. More egregiously, he had the U.S. become the only industrialized country refusing to sign the U.N. World Climate Conference of 1990’s CO2 reductions agreement, and only agreed to sign the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit global warming treaty after successfully lobbying for it to be stripped of binding agreements and timetables.
Bush Sr. was, however, an ecological saint when compared with his son George W. Bush and to the recent Republican members of Congress, especially with regard to climate change. A September 2008 article by Salon summarizes Bush Jr.’s seven most "deadly environmental sins" as completely stymieing global action on climate change by refusing to agree to mandatory greenhouse gas emission reductions, failing to regulate greenhouse gases domestically and preventing California from enacting its own regulations, neglecting to develop clean energy sources, weakening endangered species protections, issuing 35,000 off-shore drilling permits, logging national forests, and weakening clean air standards. A July 2008 article by the Telegraph best expresses Bush Jr.’s unapologetic disregard for the Earth’s ecology. Bush Jr. shocked top world leaders including Gordon Brown and Nicholas Sarkosky at the G8 summit in Japan when he, thrusting his fist in the air and grinning contemptuously, proclaimed "Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter."
Republican members of Congress has been equally contemptuous. Using 2003-06 data from the League of Conservation Voter’s yearly congressional scorecard on the environment, research ecologist Anthony Krzysik concluded the following: "Between 2003 and 2006, environmental scores of 75 or greater were calculated for three-quarters (74.9%) of all Democrats in Congress, while only 2.5% of Republicans achieved this score. At the anti-environment end of the scale representing scores of 25 or less, over four-fifths (84.2%) of Republicans voted against environmental concerns, while less than one percent (0.82%) of Democrats in Congress could be considered "anti-environmental".
The Republican Party’s ideological interest in favoring business over the rights and welfare of American citizens, and even over the fate of the Republican Party itself, is long standing and pervasive. In 1931, Republicans held 56 Senate seats. After F.D.R. was elected in 1932, Republican inability to go along with the New Deal jobs and economic re-vitalization program led to their loss of 40 Senates seats by 1937, leaving them with just 16 seats in that chamber. The rights and welfare of Americans includes the right to a sustainable environment, but as we have seen, the modern Republican Party is just as incapable of respecting those rights today as they were in the early 1930s. This is why climate change will be a decades-long albatross for the Republican Party that will eventually bring about its demise.
To reiterate the threat we face, in 2007 the IPCC concluded that our world must reduce its CO2 emissions by over 80 percent of 1990 levels by 2050 to avoid a climate catastrophe. That calculation was based on 450ppm concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere being the threshold limit we must be under by 2050 if we are to avoid a "point of no return" after which the Earth’s temperature will continue to rise, killing billions of people and leaving only the polar regions inhabitable. A year later, they discovered that the threshold limit is actually 350ppm and we are already at 388ppm.
We are more likely than not beyond the point of no return of runaway global warming. Our best chance of salvaging any reasonable future for our children, grandchildren and progeny beyond will require far more government control and regulation than we saw after the Great Depression. Republicans will no longer be able to protect business interests from the will of the People, and over the coming years their obstruction of climate change legislation will become progressively more unacceptable. As we also recall, the Millennial Generation who voted for Obama by a two to one margin, and whose future depends upon strong government action on climate change, will by 2020 comprise 40 percent of the electorate. It is because these young voters will over the next several decades vote as if their lives depended on it that the Republican Party, as we know it, has absolutely no chance of surviving. But climate change and the Millennial Generation’s need to safeguard it’s future is not the only dynamic on course to end the Republican Party. In the next section we will see how the 2008 economic recession and its causes also spells doom for a Republican Party that seems determined to hold its economic ideology above all else.