More Comedy Gold From GQP "Climate Plan" - It Aspires To Hit The 1.5C Paris Target
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After a quarter century of Republican climate denialism, The Post’s Maxine Joselow and Jeff Stein revealed this exciting news last week: “House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) plans to unveil a strategy Thursday outlining how Republicans would address climate change, energy and environmental issues.”
But there were just a couple of small problems with the resulting two-pager put out by the House GOP “Energy, Climate, & Conservation Task Force.” The strategy didn’t, er, actually mention the word “climate.” Neither did it make any commitment to decreasing greenhouse-gas emissions. The only indirect acknowledgment that climate change is even a thing was a call to mine more rare minerals of the sort used in batteries. And the strategy included a gusher of proposals to boost oil and gas production.
The Sierra Club’s legislative director, Melinda Pierce, called the plan “McCarthy’s latest attempt to greenhouse gaslight the American public.” In fairness, the man in charge of the Republican task force, Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), says the group plans to outline a fuller climate-change strategy later this year. In an interview, he told me that “global emissions as a result of our strategy would go down more than they would under Biden,” who has set a target for cutting U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions in half by 2030. No climate denier, Graves also said he wants to “try and change the trajectory and try to hit that 1.5 C target” — the Paris agreement’s goal of limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
It would be an extraordinary achievement if Graves could persuade his fellow Republicans to undergo such a sea change on climate — and I wish him gigawatts of power as he attempts it. For now, his colleagues continue to operate under what might be termed the R.E.M. climate policy: It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine. That avert-your-gaze approach worked well enough when the climate debate was about theoretical sea-level models and Arctic ice projections. But now the crisis is real and present, with food shortages, electric outages and pestilence already plaguing us.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/08/climate-change-deniers-republican-catastrophe/
