Why Republicans Still Don't Care About Climate Change

[saidsimplesimon]

This is a few days old. I've been out of touch, recovering from a heart attack. I'm under orders to stay calm and stay away from any mention on the foul smelling odor in our White House. I will hold off on surgery until that fool is rejected in November and escorted off the premises.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/why-republicans-still-dont-care-about-climate-change/ar-BB199a3c

The Atlantic
Why Republicans Still Don’t Care About Climate Change
Ronald Brownstein
5 days ago
…snip
Detailed results provided to me by Kaiser underscore an astonishing gap between the parties. Among people who agree that their communities are experiencing either more hot days, more floods, or more droughts, at least three-fourths of Democrats say climate change is a “major factor” in those events; but at least seven in 10 Republicans in each case say it is only a minor factor, or does not contribute at all. Slightly more than seven in 10 Democrats living in places experiencing more wildfires consider climate change a major factor in causing them; three-fourths of Republicans see climate as little or none of the cause. Even after this summer’s searing events, an Economist/YouGov poll released yesterday found that although three-fourths of Biden supporters said “the severity of recent hurricanes and Western wildfires is most likely the result of global climate change,” fewer than one in five Trump voters agreed.

Those contrasts offer very little reason for optimism that even if Biden wins, any meaningful numbers of congressional or state-level Republicans will feel pressure to support measures to reduce carbon emissions. Among other reasons for pessimism: In both presidential and Senate elections, Republicans are more and more reliant on the states that produce the most fossil fuels, which tend to be the same states with large populations of non-college-educated, Christian, and rural white voters drawn to Trump’s message of racial and cultural backlash.

Across the 20 states that emit the most carbon per dollar of economic output—a good proxy for states’ integration into the fossil-fuel economy—Republicans now hold 35 of their 40 Senate seats. That’s nearly enough senators to sustain a GOP filibuster against climate action on its own. The final brick in the wall of GOP opposition is that fossil-fuel producers, once an important source of campaign funding for southern Democrats such as Lyndon B. Johnson, are all-in on bolstering Republican power. Over the past 30 years, oil and gas producers have directed more than 80 percent of their massive $711 million in total federal campaign contributions toward Republicans, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
..snip

[TheRealNorth]

1. They believe

if the climate goes to shit and food/water goes scarce, that they will have enough money/land to survive on their own. Its all about social Darwinism. If the poor refuse to shut up and starve, then they have the guns.

[MatthewG.]

2. Apparently Younger Republicans are Better on this Issue

I’ve seen research that younger Republicans are substantially better on climate change issues than their elders. So maybe that’s a small bit of good news

I have serious doubts we’re up for the challenge of climate change though.

[soldierant]

3. Not only accurate statistics, but also

some excellent reasons to invest in clean energ, clean energy jobs, and clean energy production.

Put the clean energy producers to do to the fossil fuel industry what the automotive industry did to the manufacturers of buggy whips.

[marie999]

4. Very little if anything will be done about climate change.

How do I know this? I am 72 years old and have seen how people react to problems. They will not do anything until it is too late. Will this end the human race? Of course not. After enough people die, the world will start to get better. Life will be very hard but enough people will survive.