Every few months, a few Republicans manage to get good press off of a promise that they’ve totally changed their climate denying ways, and are now definitely acting in good faith in their search for climate solutions. And despite a supposedly new set of rhetoric acknowledging climate change, they always trot out the same old policies that prop up the polluters causing the climate crisis.
It was no different last week, as the Washington Examiner, Politico and the Washington Post all, relatively uncritically, reported that the GOP is sending some members of Congress to the COP26 climate negotiations. And, supposedly, unlike past years, they’re not going to try and disrupt it, but instead to show that Republicans really do care about the climate and have real solutions for the crisis.
“The Republicans who are attending acknowledge the reality of climate change,” Politico’s Morning Energy (brought to you by Chevron) reported, “and do not plan to directly undermine the conference.” Oh, really?
First of all, "directly" is doing a lot of work there. Secondly, here's the next sentence: “But they also do not support either the Paris Agreement or specific emissions reductions targets.”
Huh. So they’re not trying to directly undermine the conference, they’re just not supportive of the agreement that basically every nation on Earth signed up for — and is basically the premise of most of the negotiating that will be happening there — and they oppose anything that actually aims to reduce fossil fuel emissions.
Sounds like they may not be going in such good faith after all! Let’s see what else the GOP is up to, and maybe that will offer some hint as to the true intentions of the party bought by fossil fuel campaign contributions.
On Friday, the House Republican twitter account posted an image from Fox showing $8 gas and captioning the image “Joe Biden’s energy crisis…” But it turns out that’s actually a lower price than in April of 2019, when gas at that particular station, which is known to have the highest gas prices in California, reached $11.75 per gallon under President Trump.
But maybe these specific Republicans are different from their party!
Except Rep. Bruce Westerman and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, two of the supposedly climate-friendly Republicans going to COP26, held a forum on Friday that Politico previewed with the header “TALIBAN METAL” and described as being “on Afghanistan’s critical minerals, casting the U.S. withdrawal from the country as handing the Taliban access to one of the world’s largest deposits of vital minerals and metals necessary for clean energy technology.”
The event “follows recent Republican criticism against Democrats” that “the transition to renewable energy will increasingly rely on minerals sourced in countries with shabby human rights records and that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan added a Taliban-controlled Kabul to that list.”
Note: Yes, there are minerals in Afghanistan's mountains. However, there are currently zero operating, planned or even proposed projects for anyone to work with the Taliban to mine lithium from the notoriously hostile, in every sense of the word, mountain terrain of Afghanistan.
Also, are we just going to ignore the gross human rights violations of major oil producers, like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Russia, or Texas? Apparently so.
So before the next reporter jumps on the counter-intuitive “GOP cares about climate now!” bandwagon, maybe they should actually take a minute to sit down and watch the two hour event in which some of the exact same Republicans going to COP26 demonstrated exactly how serious they are about climate change by invoking speculative conspiracy theories that preemptively blame Democrats and climate policies for working with the Taliban to mine metals that every piece of technology with a battery needs, but they portray as some innate weakness of renewable energy.
Sure, Republicans are going to COP26 in good faith and not to undermine climate solutions! But first, they just had to hold a quick forum accusing Democrats of enriching terrorists.
