The New York Times stopped attacking centrist Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin long enough to recalibrate usual attacks on Republicans. Reporters Lisa Friedman and Jonathan Weisman front-page story Thursday coined a new pro-Democratic phrase in its online headline to portray the Republican Party as dangerously ignorant on climate change: “Delay as the New Denial: The Latest Republican Tactic to Block Climate Action.”
One hundred million Americans from Arizona to Boston are under heat emergency warnings, and the drought in the West is nearing Dust Bowl proportions. Britain declared a climate emergency as temperatures soared above 100 degrees Fahrenheit and parts of blistering Europe are ablaze.
But on Capitol Hill this week, Republicans were warning against rash action in response to the burning planet.
“I don’t want to be lectured about what we need to do to destroy our economy in the name of climate change,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina.
One Democrat, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, last week blocked what could have been the country’s most far-reaching American response to climate change. But lost in the recriminations and finger-pointing is the other side of the aisle: All 50 Republicans in the Senate have been as opposed to decisive action to confront planetary warming.
Few Republicans in Congress now outwardly dismiss the scientific evidence that human activities -- the burning of oil, gas and coal -- have produced gases that are dangerously heating the Earth.
But for many, denial of the cause of global temperature rise has been replaced by an insistence that the solution -- replacing fossil fuels over time with wind, solar and other nonpolluting energy sources -- will hurt the economy.
That’s when the Times unleashed their new anti-Republican catch phrase, perhaps coming to the back of a Volvo as a bumper sticker soon:
In short, delay is the new denial.
Overwhelmingly, Republicans on Capitol Hill say that they believe that the United States should be drilling and burning more American oil, gas and coal, and that market forces would somehow develop solutions to the carbon dioxide that has been building in the atmosphere, trapping heat like a blanket around a sweltering Earth.
Friedman and Weisman fault conservatives for not signing on to the left’s apocalyptic climate view.
The fact that scientists say nations must quickly cut greenhouse gas emissions or global rising temperatures will reach catastrophic levels does not appear to faze many conservatives.
The Times did lay out the Republican argument, though in snotty and hyperbolic fashion.
So it has gone with the Republican Party, where warnings of a catastrophe are mocked as hyperbole, where technologies that do not exist on a viable scale, such as “carbon capture and storage” and “clean coal,” are hailed as saviors….
The paper’s condescension toward Republican legislators was acute.
But even Republicans who are trying to address the effects of climate change in their home states appear to find it difficult to recognize the root cause of the problem….
There’s no need to debate man-made “climate change” anymore -- the Times is confident it’s a fact (pay no attention to the myriad hysterical media predictions of rising sea levels and various other environmental dystopian scenes that never came to pass, such as New York City underwater).
Republicans grappling with the undeniable reality of climate change still struggle with a philosophical aversion to intervening in energy markets -- or, they would most likely say, in any markets at all….
