For the past eight years, a hearing on the climate crisis in either house of Congress was a rare occurrence, and any that did take place overflowed with scientific illiteracy and climate science denial.
Since the Democrats won a solid majority in the House of Representatives last November, however, at least 15 climate-related hearings have been conducted in the 65 days Congress has been in session this year. And while the overlapping cohorts of incumbent numbskulls and deniers are still present, and some testimony from expert witnesses still reflects the Exxon-Koch agenda, realism about what impacts climate change is having now and what we may face from it in the near and distant future have been the dominant themes.
Remarkably, some Republicans known in the past for vigorously rejecting the scientific consensus about the climate crisis have changed their tune a bit. How much of this is a genuine change of mind and how much is a smokescreen shielding their real views is anybody’s guess.
But while most of these men and women have made statements in the past—challenging the scientific consensus on climate change, disputing whether greenhouse gases are truly altering the Earth’s climate, rolling their eyes at anybody who says dealing with the climate is an urgent matter, and assorted other nonsense—not a single one of them has tossed a snowball into a hearing room in the past two months while claiming it to be proof that global warming isn’t happening, as Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma did four years ago.
Progress!
Dino Grandoni reports:
Democrats want to elevate an issue that they say House Republicans almost entirely ignored during their eight years in power in the chamber.
“Today’s hearing on climate change is long overdue,” House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.) said during his panel’s first hearing in the new Congress in early February. “We are feeling its effects now, and the influence of unchecked climate change is becoming more obvious every year.”
One hearing in the House Natural Resources Committee sought to examine how climate-fueled floods and wildfires are disrupting Native American communities. Another in the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee looked at how emissions from cars, airplanes and other modes of transportation makes global warming worse.
The shift away from outright denial among a few Republicans has been touted by the handful of media that covers the climate hearings. But while that shift would seem to offer hope of some actual bipartisanship on climate action that can make a difference, it comes with a big fat caveat.
Take, for example, Republican Rep. John Shimkus of Illinois, the ranking member on the Subcommittee on Environment and Climate Change of the Committee on Energy and Commerce. Ten years ago he rejected the reality of the climate crisis during debate over a cap-and-trade bill, saying that God had promised not to destroy much of life on Earth again the way he did with the Great Flood. “I believe that is the infallible word of God, and that’s how it’s going to be for his creation.”
He’s softened his stance now and argues for pragmatism and using climate hearings “to learn more about the technologies and actions that are expected to accelerate the reduction of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions.” He and a handful of other Republicans are focusing on technological innovation to deal with the climate crisis. But not carbon pricing. And not regulations to reduce emissions. And definitely not the Green New Deal or the Paris Climate Accord.
Indeed, Shimkus, along with a host of other prominent Republicans, praised Donald Trump for announcing in 2017 that he would pull the U.S. out of the accord as soon as possible, which is late next year. Their argument was that President Obama shouldn’t have made unilateral promises in Paris in 2015 to cut U.S. emissions and to provide $3 billion to the fund that assists poorer nations to cope with the climate crisis. Obama should have come to Congress and asked for a bill on the matter, Shimkus said, with a straight face.
That nonsense should have been spoken with a smirk instead, given that, as he well knows, no way would the Republican-controlled Congress have passed any such bill, given its instructions to obstruct all things Obama and keep performing its deep kowtow to the fossil fuel industry.
The same can be said for Obama’s Clean Power Plan that the Environmental Protection Agency designed to cut emissions at coal-fired power plants. Shimkus was strongly opposed to that plan and was glad to see Trump propose an alternative to it called the Affordable Clean Energy rule. That would allow more carbon emissions, free the states to write their own emissions rules, and fail to fulfill the EPA’s obligation under the Clean Air Act, repeatedly upheld by the Supreme Court, to shield Americans from the perils of climate pollution. The Trump regime’s proposal was yet another gift to the fossil fuel industry.
Perhaps these few House Republicans, like a few of their Senate colleagues, will finally get truly serious about dealing with climate change. But nobody should get too excited about that possibility just because they’re no longer quoting Genesis as their scientific text or claiming climate change is a liberal hoax. That seeming reasonableness we’re hearing comes after many, many years of their denial and spreading of disinformation about climate change while they worked to block every effort to address it. If they were still in charge as they were for eight years, no climate hearings would be happening, and they would be still supporting the same anti-scientific attitudes and policies that have covered us up to our eyebrows in deep dung.
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Each of the following committees and subcommittees have conducted one or more climate hearings in the past two months: House Science, Space and Technology Committee; House Natural Resources Committee; Natural Resources Subcommittee on Water, Oceans, and Wildlife; Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigation; House Subcommittee for Indigenous People of the United States; Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources; House Science, Space and Technology Committee; Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands; House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee; Subcommittee on Environment and Climate Change.