Republicans Are Going All Out to Sabotage a Global Climate Deal - by Joe Romm

Over the past year, GOP leaders, driven by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), have made a radical shift in the party’s public position on climate change.  They are now actively seeking to destroy a global climate deal.

In any other universe this would be a major news story. But I guess the mainstream media has become so jaded to what the Koch brothers and Tea Party have done to the Republican party at a national level, that this radical shift seems just like another dog-bites-man-story, albeit one where the wound is fatal.

In fact, for most of the past quarter-century, most of the GOP leadership has at least given lip service to the idea that global warming is a global problem that needs a global solution.  Not only have they abandoned that public position, but they now apparently believe the role of the “exceptional” and “indispensable” nation is to actively work to undermine the world’s best chance to save billions of people — including generations of Americans — from needless misery.
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Yet, the deal poised to come out of Paris is exceedingly good from the United States’ point of view, as I’ve discussed.  “The U.S. climate plans are at the least ambitious end of what would be a fair contribution,” as the independent analytical team at Climate Action Tracker put it — doubly so because we are the richest country in the world and the single biggest cumulative contributor of carbon pollution.

McConnell’s actions end the pretense that the GOP leadership has any interest whatsoever in trying to globally address the gravest preventable threat America faces.  As [Jonathan] Chait notes, “The speed at which Republicans have changed from insisting other countries would never reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions to warning other countries not to do so — without a peep of protest from within the party or the conservative movement — says everything you need to know about the party’s stance on climate change.”

I’m not sure a major political leader has ever pursued a strategy that is so directly counter to the health and well-being of all Americans, their children, and the next 50 generations.  The Pope ends his encyclical calling on God to “[e]nlighten those who possess power and money that they may avoid the sin of indifference, that they may love the common good, advance the weak, and care for this world in which we live.  The poor and the earth are crying out.”

If indifference to the dangers of climate inaction by the rich and powerful is a sin, how immoral is it for the rich and powerful to actively try to block the entire world from acting?

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