TheGreenFront presents: This Day in Climate History November 28, 2010: In a New York Times article, Veerabhadran Ramanathan of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and David G. Victor of the University of California, San Diego discuss the need to make progress on climate change. nytimes/2010/11/28/opinion/28victor.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 November 28, 2014: • In the New York Times, Paul Krugman observes: Of course, polluters will defend their right to pollute, but why can they count on Republican support? When and why did the Republican Party become the party of pollution? For it wasn’t always thus. The Clean Air Act of 1970, the legal basis for the Obama administration’s environmental actions, passed the Senate on a bipartisan vote of 73 to 0, and was signed into law by Richard Nixon. (I’ve heard veterans of the E.P.A. describe the Nixon years as a golden age.) A major amendment of the law, which among other things made possible the cap-and-trade system that limits acid rain, was signed in 1990 by former President George H.W. Bush. But that was then. Today’s Republican Party is putting a conspiracy theorist who views climate science as a gigantic hoax in charge of the Senate’s environment committee. And this isn’t an isolated case. Pollution has become a deeply divisive partisan issue. And the reason pollution has become partisan is that Republicans have moved right. A generation ago, it turns out, environment wasn’t a partisan issue: according to Pew Research, in 1992 an overwhelming majority in both parties favored stricter laws and regulation. Since then, Democratic views haven’t changed, but Republican support for environmental protection has collapsed. So what explains this anti-environmental shift? You might be tempted simply to blame money in politics, and there’s no question that gushers of cash from polluters fuel the anti-environmental movement at all levels. But this doesn’t explain why money from the most environmentally damaging industries, which used to flow to both parties, now goes overwhelmingly in one direction. Take, for example, coal mining. In the early 1990s, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, the industry favored Republicans by a modest margin, giving around 40 percent of its money to Democrats. Today that number is just 5 percent. Political spending by the oil and gas industry has followed a similar trajectory. Again, what changed? One answer could be ideology. Textbook economics isn’t anti-environment; it says that pollution should be limited, albeit in market-friendly ways when possible. But the modern conservative movement insists that government is always the problem, never the solution, which creates the will to believe that environmental problems are fake and environmental policy will tank the economy. My guess, however, is that ideology is only part of the story — or, more accurately, it’s a symptom of the underlying cause of the divide: rising inequality. nytimes/2014/11/28/opinion/paul-krugman-pollution-and-politics.html?ref=opinion&_r=0 • In the Los Angeles Times, Daniel F. Becker and James Gerstenzang of the Safe Climate Campaign observe: GMs failure to substantially cut its vehicles pollution threatens the success of the Obama administrations tough auto mileage and emissions rules, the biggest single step any nation has taken against global warming — and this after taxpayers bailed the company out of bankruptcy. The standards require the fleet of new cars and trucks sold in the United States in 2025 to average 54.5 mpg. Achieving this is auto mechanics, not rocket science. GM could start down the right path by using on-the-shelf technology. latimes/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-becker-cars-emissions-gm-20141128-story.html
Posted on: Fri, 28 Nov 2014 12:29:48 +0000
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