" . . . A Global Economic Collapse That Will Make The Great Depression Look Like A Paper Cut" [View all]

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Republicans spend a lot of time freaking out about the changing demographics of America, and how the fact that we are projected to become a majority-minority country by 2045 is the flashpoint for the rise of white nationalism in the GOP, but they should also worry about losing voters they already have who view standard GOP policy as a threat to their lives. It could not be clearer that the existing political and economic establishment—on the left, right and center—do not want to seriously address an ongoing crisis whose only solution is the radical reorganization of society as we know it.

Millennials understand that this is not an either/or issue as far as what climate change will do to the economy. If we do nothing to combat this threat, and the global temperature rises by two degrees Celsius, it will cost the world $69 trillion in damages. I’m no math major, but I’m pretty sure that is significantly more than Bernie Sanders’s $16 trillion plan for the Green New Deal. In fact, that massive figure is 86% of last year’s global GDP. If you want to boil this crisis down to nothing more than dollar figures in order to fit the extremely narrow gilded constraints of normal political discourse in this country, what we are talking about with climate change is a global economic collapse that will make the Great Depression look like a paper cut.

Republicans are in trouble because they have essentially gone all in on one constituency (old white men) to the detriment of all others. Millennial women have functionally abandoned the Republican Party, and the GOP wipeouts in the suburbs since 2016 are reason to believe that trend is extending to women in older generations as well. If you care about the future of the planet, then that means your priorities do not align with those of the Republican Party. On the whole, young Republicans understand this.

In the 1990s, the argument to combat climate change was portrayed as hippie environmentalist pie-in-the-sky thinking that had no basis in reality, and the Very Serious People ruled the discourse about What Is Possible (which simply translates to “whatever makes more money for rich people”). Now, the fact that those of us who have not buried our heads in the sand can see hellish reality of climate change all around us has rendered the Very Serious People the unserious ones, as in order to make their Very Serious argument, they must deny observable reality. Doing nothing to fight climate change is objectively the most expensive option, and no matter your political stripes, us young people would like to live on the same habitable planet that our parents did (which is probably already a lost cause). If Republicans do not realize this simple fact rooted in human survivalist instincts, and at least acknowledge the need to do something in order to avoid making their children and grandchildren’s lives unbearably hopeless, then the party will follow in the footsteps of the millions of species currently going extinct due to climate change.

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https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2019/11/republicans-have-a-climate-change-problem.html