Climate Change And Conservative Brain Death - New York Magazine

During Thursday night’s Republican debate, a moderator — finally! — asked about climate change, and Marco Rubio supplied an answer that, while banal and dogmatic, was fascinating in its own way. The regular Republican policy apparatus has been frozen for nearly a year as its Establishment has desperately fended off the Trump insurgency. Presented with a plea from Miami’s Republican mayor, whose city is already coping with the flooding that results from elevated sea levels, Rubio repeated his formulaic and un-categorical opposition to any policy to limit the greenhouse-gas emissions that are in the process of sinking his home city. Rubio’s reply was not just the last gasp of a dying campaign, but a state-of-the-art expression of party doctrine. Trump is what the regular Republicans are trying to stave off; Rubio represents what they are fighting to preserve: a delusional anti-government ideology unable to process or cope with real-world conditions.

His climate-change response, in particular, recapitulated almost word for word the denialist stance he has stubbornly maintained for years, as though nothing has changed. A casual listener might have gotten the impression that the world Rubio is describing, or mis-describing, is more or less the same one that existed a few years ago. But it isn’t. It is in the midst of a green-energy revolution that is proceeding with astonishing and increasing speed, and rendering the backward orthodoxy mouthed by Rubio increasingly comic.

Rubio’s argument contains three parts. First, even when twice asked to do so, he refuses to accept the theory of anthropogenic global warming, which is the consensus belief held by climate scientists that the release of heat-trapping gasses into the atmosphere leads to warmer temperatures. Climate-science deniers have spent years and years feebly picking apart the theory, seizing upon ambiguities or any possible grounds for doubt. Rubio has clung to this line, claiming as recently as 2014 that global temperatures “have stabilized.” In the last few months, though, the world has seen confirmation that 2015 was the hottest year in recorded history, and then, in February, the most unusually warm month ever recorded. Amazingly, Rubio continues to maintain this is all just a bunch of stuff that happens with no discernible pattern, insisting, “There's never been a time when the climate has not changed,” and dismissing efforts to limit greenhouse-gas emissions as a futile effort to “change the weather,” using a favorite sneer for climate-science skeptics, who conflate weather with climate.

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When Republican leaders used this argument against cap-and-trade in 2010, it was a pessimistic read of the international climate scene. Today it is as utterly delusional as insisting Stephen Curry could never make it in the NBA. Obviously, in December, the first-ever global climate-change pact was signed. Conservatives dismiss this, and almost any international treaty, as hopelessly unworkable. But growing mountains of actual evidence show that the world is, if anything, decarbonizing even more rapidly than promised in Paris. Worldwide greenhouse-gas emissions fell in 2015 — the first time they have ever dropped in a period of significant economic growth. China — whose rapidly growing emissions made it the justifiable focus of worldwide climate diplomacy — has particularly exceeded expectations. Not long ago, it had officially promised to cap its greenhouse-gas emissions in 2040. Two years ago, it agreed to move its peak emissions date up to 2030. In Paris, it moved the date up again, to 2025. A report last week from the London School of Economics suggests that China’s emissions may have already peaked — a success far beyond the most optimistic hopes even a few years ago. (China’s economic statistics are not always reliable, but the underlying factors driving its emissions — massive new investments in clean energy sources, a steep drop-off in its coal-burning heavy industry — are relatively transparent.)

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http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/03/climate-change-and-conservative-brain-death.html#