Krugman - On COVID As On Climate, The Right Has Decayed From Denial To Pure Irrationality [View all]

[hatrack]

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However, while there are important similarities between the right’s response to climate change and its response to Covid-19, there are also some important differences. The pandemic has opened frontiers in destructive irrationality. You see, while climate denial was intellectually irresponsible and morally indefensible, it also made a kind of narrow-minded sense. For one thing, warnings about climate change always involved the long run, making it easy for denialists to claim that short-run fluctuations refuted the whole concept: “See, it’s cold today, so global warming is a hoax!” This kind of evasion has gotten harder lately, now that we’re having what were supposed to be once-in-100-years fires and floods every couple of years. But it helped confuse the issue.

Also, there was big money behind climate denial. Fossil fuel interests were prepared to spend large sums creating a fog of skepticism in the expectation that delaying climate action would be good for their bottom lines. Last and least, but not irrelevant, free-market ideologues didn’t want to hear about problems that the free market can’t solve.

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How did that happen? I’d tell the story this way: America’s rapid vaccination pace during the spring was very good news for the nation — but it was also a success story for the Biden administration. So influential conservatives, for whom owning the libs is always an overriding goal, began throwing up roadblocks to the vaccination program. This had far-reaching consequences. As I’ve written before, the modern G.O.P. is more like an authoritarian political cult than a normal political party, so vaccine obstruction — not necessarily denunciation of the vaccines themselves, but opposition to any effort to get shots into people’s arms — became a loyalty test, a position you took to prove yourself a loyal Trumpist Republican.

Presumably, the politicians who made this calculation had no idea that reality would strike back this hard and this fast — that Florida would so quickly find itself with almost nine times New York’s rate of hospitalizations, that cities in Texas would find themselves virtually out of I.C.U. beds. But it’s almost impossible for them to change course. If Ron DeSantis were to admit the deadliness of his Covid mistakes, his political ambitions would be over.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/09/opinion/climate-denial-covid-denial.html