July has been the hottest month ever recorded—not locally, not regionally, but across the globe. More than one-third of all Americans are currently under some level of heat advisory as multiple heat domes cook the country. Hospitals are currently treating burn patients who were injured because they fell onto sunbaked roads or sidewalks. Ocean temperatures near the Florida Keys have reached over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, causing a new massive bleaching and die-off in "one of the Florida Keys' most resilient reefs."
And all of that is precursor. Scientists believe key Atlantic Ocean circulation currents may be near the point of collapse, a change that would have broad-reaching consequences for at least half of the world.
Climate change is here, and we're already taking a pounding from a "new normal" that will continue to get worse for a good long while, even if we shut off every source of carbon emissions mankind produces.
And Republicans? Republicans do not give a flying damn.
This story by Capitol Hill reporter Pablo Manríquez in The New Republic is well worth a read, if only because Manríquez went to the effort to ask a whole basket of House Republicans their thoughts about the heat their own constituents are cooking under—and the mocking contempt for the question positively drips from every mouth. Hang this one up and frame it, because you won't find a better summation of Republicanism anywhere.
“Only in Washington will they try to find an excuse to take something that’s been going on for hundreds of years … to promote their crazy left agenda,” said House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, bristling at the suggestion that man-made climate change might be behind the heat dome. “Southern Louisiana, it’s always hot,” he said. “Thank God for air conditioning,” laughed Scalise, perhaps unaware that incarcerated juveniles in his state’s Angola Prison are reporting temperatures as high as 132 degrees, according to an emergency filing last Monday by the American Civil Liberties Union.
We can all rest assured that Scalise has never given a dime's worth of thought to Louisiana juveniles sitting in 132-degree prison cells, and he never will. But the broader point is that what is happening now is quite definitely not what has been happening for hundreds of years, which is what "hottest month ever recorded" or "hottest ocean temperature ever recorded" means, if this melonhead spent even two seconds thinking about it.
Does it get hot in Louisiana during summertime? You bet it does. Does it get this hot, in this many places, all at once? No. Not until now, it sure didn't.
The rest of the Louisiana contingent also could not find a damn to give, although Sen. Bill Cassidy took the opportunity to invoke what the rest of the planet might remember as a scene from “Schindler's List.”
Bayou State Senator Bill Cassidy, a medical doctor who once treated patients in Angola, suggested cooling down the prisoners by “spraying water” from a “garden hose or lawn sprinkler” to lower the temperature. “I got nothing for you on that,” said John Kennedy, the other Louisiana senator, when asked if the state’s prisons should be air conditioned.
Yeah, what if we just sprayed inmates through the bars with a garden hose? That'll fix it.
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Manríquez doesn't appear to have been able to track down Sen. Ted Cruz, which is astonishing because all you have to do is hold up a microphone or smartphone and Cruz will fight his way through a tour bus’ worth of grandmas to get to you. But he does note a Texas Public Radio report of Cruz swatting away any thought that climate change might have anything to do with, you know, the changing climate. "There are lots of people who have political agendas, and whatever happens with the weather they attribute to climate change. That's not science, it’s ideology," Cruz whined.
Again, though: That’s not how this works. Measuring global temperatures and noting that the numbers are higher than the numbers used to be is science. Ideology is when you say, "I think that on balance, perhaps it would be better to not destroy most of Florida and a good chunk of the Eastern Seaboard, even if Ted Cruz does not himself have a problem with it."
The Republican Party is not, of course, merely committed to mocking climate change even as scientists now tell us we're stewing in it. The party is committed to making climate change worse, on purpose. It's part of the same fascist twitch that has the party reflexively opposing anything any non-Republican has to say to them, whether it be pandemic disease specialists, climate researchers, or scientists who warn them not to drink pool cleaner for funsies.
That's why these same House and Senate Republicans have already drafted plans to reverse every bit of the Biden administration's energy modernization and resilience programs as soon as the next Republican president takes office. It's not that they don't care either way. They want to do actively destructive things because doing destructive things is literally all that Republicanism stands for.
Well, that and crimes, apparently.
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