On COVID, On Climate, Republicans Hate Science. How Many Will Die As A Result?
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Roughly a quarter of Republicans endorse QAnon’s lunatic beliefs, a third say that coronavirus vaccines are definitely or probably being used by the government to implant microchips, and a majority back the “big lie” that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Many on the right will believe anything, no matter how loony and illogical, that comports with their political proclivities. The Republican rejection of science makes it extremely difficult, verging on impossible, to deal with two of the biggest crises we currently face: global warming and the coronavirus pandemic.
Evidence of global warming’s calamitous consequences is growing daily. As my Post colleagues noted on Saturday: “Massive floods deluged Central Europe, Nigeria, Uganda and India in recent days, killing hundreds. June’s scorching temperatures, followed by a fast-moving wildfire, erased a Canadian town. More than a million people are close to starvation amid Madagascar’s worst drought in decades. In Siberia, tens of thousands of square miles of forest are ablaze, potentially unleashing carbon stored in the frozen ground below.” It’s not as if the United States is exempt from these global trends. We just had the hottest June on record. Two states — Oregon and Washington — suffered nearly 200 deaths in a recent heat wave. Drought and wildfires are spreading across the West, inflicting more human suffering and steep economic losses.
Perversely, even as the effects of global warming become clearer, the percentage of Republicans who think that global warming is a major problem has declined. Another recent Gallup poll found that only 29 percent of Republicans believe that the effects of global warming have already begun (down from 46 percent in 1997), and only 32 percent accept that global warming is caused by human activity (down from 52 percent in 2003). The Republicans are in full flight from rationality. The right-wing view was pithily expressed by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), an inexhaustible font of absurdity, who called climate change “bulls--t." When Republican leaders speak of climate change at all, it is usually to promote bogus fears that Democrats are going to take away their hamburgers.
Even the so-called moderate Republicans in the Senate who negotiated with President Biden over an infrastructure bill stripped most of the funding for clean energy, because presumably they don’t think that’s an investment we need. While Republicans fixate on the (admittedly significant) costs of cutting greenhouse gas emissions, they ignore the catastrophic costs of allowing global temperatures to continue rising unabated.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/28/people-are-dying-because-republican-hostility-science/
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