Climate change will increasingly turn the earth into a hellish planet without immediate action to slash greenhouse gas emissions according to a U.N. report released today, but the Trump administration had already surrendered in defeat last month declaring that 7 degrees F warming is inevitable because nothing can be done to stop it.
Last month, deep in a 500-page environmental impact statement, the Trump administration made a startling assumption: On its current course, the planet will warm a disastrous seven degrees by the end of this century.
A rise of seven degrees Fahrenheit, or about four degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels would be catastrophic, according to scientists. Many coral reefs would dissolve in increasingly acidic oceans. Parts of Manhattan and Miami would be underwater without costly coastal defenses. Extreme heat waves would routinely smother large parts of the globe.
But the administration did not offer this dire forecast, premised on the idea that the world will fail to cut its greenhouse gas emissions, as part of an argument to combat climate change. Just the opposite: The analysis assumes the planet’s fate is already sealed.
Much has been written today about the U.N. report www.theguardian.com/… and Dana Nuccitelli wrote about the Trump administration entering stage 5 climate denial www.theguardian.com/… but the fine writing of scientists and reporters has done little to analyze and understand the hell planet that we are moving towards and why conservatives and libertarians believe they can do nothing to stop it from happening. They have also not discussed how Republicans intend to respond to the increasingly horrific disasters that the IPCC predicts will happen as the planet heats up. However, there have been prophets in the world of literature and music who have ventured into the minds of conservatives and the worlds they may create if we follow them. The American Republican version of conservatism has become particularly hopeless because of their shared belief system.
There are two primary reasons that Republicans have no hope that anything can be done about the warming climate.
First of all, they cannot visualize a better world created by the application of science and technological improvements. This is exemplified by a conversation I had with a telephone company repairman who asked how could we eliminate gas and diesel burning trucks to fight climate change. He couldn’t visualize electric trucks powered by wind and solar energy, but a few years after that conversation we can see huge improvements in battery and electric vehicle technology that will make electric vehicles feasible on a large scale.
The second and more problematic reason is that American conservatives have rejected international cooperation to solve global problems. When global cooperation is rejected global scale problems cannot be solved. The lack of faith in people not like us leads to the belief that other people will cheat on agreements, therefore goals cannot be met and good white Americans will loose out on the good life they have to cheating foreigners. Unfortunately, many global warming scenarios closely resemble the apocalyptic visions in the Christian book of Revelations. Thus a hellish world is one future that Republicans are able to visualize. Many of them have repeatedly been told of the horrific future envisioned in Revelations where non believers are cast into a lake of fire.
Thus the Republican response has been to build a wall to keep foreigners fleeing the degrading climate south of the border out of the U.S. The fact that most of the people crossing the border are Christians has not been good enough for Republicans. Only white Christians need apply. Under the threat of a degrading climate professed religious beliefs are disregarded by conservative American white people for self-protection against outsiders. Playwright and musician Anais Mitchell foresaw the fascist vision of Hadestown “Build the wall” almost a decade ago. Note that the people inside the wall become its prisoners in the name of keeping out the other under the justifications of security and prosperity. War and terrorism evolve from demonization of the other and a lack of trust.
Thus, under Trump we have come to the point where babies are ripped from their mothers arms and prison camps for children have been built in the remote drylands of Texas. International laws on refugees and asylum seekers have been trampled in the guise of protecting America. Women under threat of murder south of the border have been sent back only to be murdered days later. This horror is done in the name of enforcing American law, but it is in stark violation of international law. Republicans have rejected international law and Christian teachings on how to treat refugees to maintain white male dominance of the United States.
The first climate refugees from central America to the United States were in 1998 following category 5 Hurricane Mitch which devastated central America with catastrophic flooding caused by 50 inches of rain in the mountains. Over 19,000 people were killed according to best estimates. en.wikipedia.org/…
1997-1998 was the super El Niño that shattered global temperature records which exceeded the previous range of natural variability in global temperatures. The superheated conditions that spawned Mitch were the result of human-caused climate change, not natural variability. Thus the refugees from central America in 1998 were the first climate refugees. The Trump administration has attempted to sent these refugees back, but has been prevented by the courts on the basis of illegal racial animus.
The conservative Republican plan to deal with climate change is to keep out refugees at the southern border and let them fend for themselves no matter how many people suffer and die.
This climate change horror was foreseen by the great African American writer Octavia Butler.
www.newyorker.com/...
By the time she began working on the Parable books, in 1989, Butler was in her forties and had written nine novels. The series, she decided,would be her “If this goes on…” story. In colorful diagrams, Butler extrapolated her vision of a near-future dystopia from what she read in the news, forecasting what kind of collapse might result if the forces of late-stage capitalism, climate change, mass incarceration, big pharma, gun violence, and the tech industry continued unhampered. (“More Hispanics,” she writes in one notebook. “More High Tech.”) Butler took a cyclical view of history. She also thought social progress was reversible. As the public sphere became hollowed out, a fear of change would create an opening for retrograde politics. With collapse, racism would become more overt.
The sequel, “Parable of the Talents,” published in 1998, begins in 2032. By then, various forms of indentured servitude and slavery are common, facilitated by high-tech slave collars. The oppression of women has become extreme; those who express their opinion, “nags,” might have their tongues cut out. People are addicted not only to designer drugs but also to “dream masks,” which generate virtual fantasies as guided dreams, allowing wearers to submerge themselves in simpler, happier lives. News comes in the form of disks or “news bullets,” which “purport to tell us all we need to know in flashy pictures and quick, witty, verbal one-two punches. Twenty-five or thirty words are supposed to be enough in a news bullet to explain either a war or an unusual set of Christmas lights.” The Donner Administration has written off science, but a more immediate threat lurks: a violent movement is being whipped up by a new Presidential candidate, Andrew Steele Jarret, a Texas senator and religious zealot who is running on a platform to “make American great again.”
The end stage of the Republican plan to deal with climate change is billions of dead people and terrestrial and marine mass extinction of plants and animals. It would be the hell on earth of the book of Revelations with no redemption and no refuge for white Americans from the hell that they created.
It is not inevitable. We must stop them. The Republican party has become a death cult.