Remember back in February, when the popularity of the Green New Deal was putting pressure on Republicans to start saying marginally more true things about climate change--like, that it’s real? But then their response was to tout innovation, something GOP pollster and messaging Svengali Frank Luntz suggested back in 2002? And we were like, “hmm let’s not take these claims at face value?”
Or when, a couple months later, the fact that Republicans put Garret Graves (R-LA) as ranking minority member of the House Climate Crisis Committee was supposedly a sign that there may be a shift in the GOP, since Graves nominally accepts the reality of climate change? And we were like “uh maybe not so much…?”
And then what about how the Chamber of Commerce revised its climate change statement, leading to reporting suggesting it was shifting its position, and we suggested that if that were true the Chamber should confess to what it’s done?
Well, if anyone was under the happy delusion that the opponents to climate action were starting to change their tune--we hate to break it to you, but you’ve been had.
As E&E reported last week, the Chamber of Commerce may have changed its website, but it hasn’t changed its agenda. Instead, it’s sticking with its plan of defending polluters by inserting itself into litigation over the Trump Administration’s replacement for Obama’s Clean Power Plan. On one side of that fight are groups like the American Lung Association, who are arguing that Trump’s plan lets polluters off the hook and is therefore not a suitable or justifiable way to reduce carbon pollution. On the other side stands Trump’s polluter-appointed administration, and next to them is the Chamber of Commerce.
So some language on the website might’ve changed, but the Chamber’s agenda of attacking pollution reduction efforts remains the same.
Meanwhile, how about that Garret Graves? Is he steering the GOP towards the shores of climate reality, as sea level rise continues to literally eat away at his home state? Again, E&E gives lie to the idea that the GOP is softening its denial, this time by pointing out that the House committee hired Philip Rossetti. Who’s that, you ask?
Oh, just one of the CREEP-y authors of the “bogus” report claiming the Green New Deal would cost $93 trillion, a figure that even its authors acknowledge can’t possibly be accurate. As Rossetti’s co-author explained in an interview, they were just trying to spitball whether the GND would “cost tens of millions of dollars or tens of billions of dollars or tens of trillions of dollars” because it’s not about the exact cost but that “the order of magnitude matters the most.”
But obviously they didn’t give broad, order-of-magnitude results, that would honestly reflect the fundamental impossibility of accurately pricing out policies that haven’t been defined. No, instead they gave a very specific number that gives the illusion of precision. In other words, they knew what they were putting out was unreliable with a functionally infinite margin of error, but ran with it anyway.
Pretty much the definition of acting in bad faith.
If Graves and the GOP were even remotely serious about bucking the party’s fossil fuel donors and tackling climate change, a bare minimum first step would be not hiring someone with a proven track record of intentional deception on the issue.
If instead, they’re trying to avoid the polling pitfalls of being a denier by making sensible statements in public, but continuing to sabotage any real efforts at climate action behind the scenes, well, it’d probably look a lot like this.
Which is one of the many reasons why, as Dave Levitan explained recently in The New Republic, people like Frank Luntz who “helped break the world” should not now “be trusted to help fix it.”
