Last week, American voters installed the largest Republican majority in both the House and the Senate since the 1950s. Although repercussions are inevitable, most of the consequences of the midterm election will take time to manifest. One that will not is the likely ascension of Oklahoma GOP Sen. Jim Inhofe to the chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, replacing Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.).
Inhofe is notorious for his aggressively skeptical views on climate change—he wrote a book titled The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future—and his chairmanship would immeasurably undermine the leadership Congress needs to definitively address the very real problem of man-made global warming.
The Environment and Public Works Committee exerts significant control over the government’s stance on environmental protection. As chairman from 2003-2007, Inhofe claimed in a Senate session that global temperature increases will in fact benefit Americans. In 2012, he claimed that only God controls climate change. Most recently, Inhofe lambasted the climate agreement reached Tuesday between the U.S. and China.
Beyond illustrating the consequences of elections often decided based on other issues, Inhofe’s reinstatement echoes a more pernicious trend toward the counterfactual regarding climate change. Despite the the fact that 97.5 percent of climatologists consider the link between human activity and global warming incontrovertible, influential public figures like Inhofe continue to frame the issue as a supposedly debatable controversy.
But the science is in. Opinion will neither change the existence of climate change nor mitigate its effects. And those effects—irreversible and undesirable impacts on geography, trade, populations, and livelihood—are so well-demonstrated as to be common knowledge.
The inescapable corollary is that climate change should no longer be exploitable as politically contentious. While skepticism is a valid and integral feature of both democratic systems and the scientific method, Congressional Republicans’ selective application of liberal Enlightenment values has forged a party almost universally opposed to addressing climate change. Blatantly ignoring the science behind the need for such policies, incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ken.) has vowed to remove EPA restrictions on power plants’ carbon emissions. As midterm election fever subsides, President Obama will soon face pressure to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which will carry oil extracted from Canadian tar sands, an energy-intensive and polluting way of producing oil, into the U.S.
The contrast between Inhofe’s politics and his new position has given his Democratic opponents their first bit of good news since the midterm. But the ease with which Republicans have wrenched the environmental discussion out of the realm of policy and into the realm of politics—and the readiness with which Democrats have let them in a play for popular support—is good for nobody. The U.S. currently ranks alongside China as one of the top two polluting nations on Earth. As a United Nations report released last week predicts, barring action by national leaders, climate change will soon become irreversible. Once it does, even the most environmentally conscious committee chairman will be unable to make a difference.
“But the science is in. Opinion will neither change the existence of climate change nor mitigate its effects. And those effects—irreversible and undesirable impacts on geography, trade, populations, and livelihood—are so well-demonstrated as to be common knowledge.”
Really? The science is in? There is, of course, little doubt that, all things being equal, increased CO2 in the atmosphere exerts upward pressure on global temps. What no one knows, however, are the answers to the following three questions:
(1) Is AGCC a net benefit to humanity or a net detriment?
(2) If AGCC is a net detriment, is there anything that can be done about it?
(3) Assuming that something can be done about it, are the expenditures, lost-opportunity costs etc. worth it?
Like I said, no one knows the answers to those questions, least of all some self-important and bombastic student editorial board members.
By the way, I chuckle a little bit about the “irreversible” nature of climate change. Perhaps you guys should ask yourselves why CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are so low.
“Despite the the fact that 97.5 percent of climatologists consider the link between human activity and global warming incontrovertible, influential public figures like Inhofe continue to frame the issue as a supposedly debatable controversy.”
I got a kick out of this one too. Science isn’t consensus. I refer back to the three questions. Answer them.