The Witness Chronicles, September 5, 2024

Republicans really don’t care about climate change

Photo by Alex Belogub on Unsplash

Zero Percent of Republican Voters Are Concerned About Climate Change?

A ‘head in the sand’ polling result

This one is a little crazy, but what isn’t this year? While scanning recent polls I came across one where voters were asked what issues concerned them most. As expected the economy and the border were high on the Republican list, while women’s reproductive rights were up there with Democrats. No news there.

But one number stood out for me, a number you seldom see in polls. Zero. That was how climate issues ranked with Republicans.

Beyond my usual disclaimer about polls, this still struck me as a really strange sign of the tribal divide we have amongst voters, a divide that seems strangely removed from reality. Have the two factors that might explain this really taken that strong a hold on an entire party?

Those two factors are the spending and lying by the fossil fuels industry, and the distrust of science, i.e. facts, that seems to have infected the right, who apparently prefer to only believe things that concur with what they want, vs reality.

Denial, in other words, but denial on a massive scale and a massively dangerous scale. To me, it verifies the depressing reality that these deniers no longer pay any attention to reality and facts, even when they are watching their homes burn, wading through the streets of their hometown, or suddenly paying ten times what homeowner’s insurance used to cost.

Those are not crazy liberal stories, those are actual things happening all over the country, but, ironically, especially in red states like Texas, Louisiana, and Florida. How many times must we watch delusional people demand money from the government to rebuild homes squarely in the path of hurricanes, flooding, or fire, or all three?

I have a close friend who recently relocated from here (western NY) to Santa Barbara, CA. This week she started shopping for automotive and renters insurance there. The first agency she went to told her outright that they would pass on selling her policies.

Apparently there was no price where the risk was worth it. And options were very limited as all the major national insurers had pulled out of the California market. This was not homeowner’s insurance, it was renter’s insurance, which typically only covers the possessions in the building, not the property itself. My renter’s insurance is under two hundred a year. She may end up paying many times that.

If Republicans need proof that climate change is here and damn scary, that should be it. But the right and the oil people have shifted the perception and the blame to paranoia about the economy, first to Biden, and now to Kamala Harris.

It’s an astounding feat of mass hypnosis fueled by unlimited money, years of phony research studies producing predetermined ‘facts’, and outright lying by politicians. But that tribal divide I mentioned earlier is what scares me the most.

Global climate change is not a political issue. It affects all of us, not just Democrats, Republicans, or any other group. Pretending it doesn't even exist is absurd on the surface but dangerous as hell in reality. This is weather, really bad weather, on a scale never seen before.

Those forest fires that cause a constant haze over my hometown, even though we are thousands of miles from the nearest blaze? They are driven by increasing average temperatures that cause insect infestations that kill standing trees, temperatures that fill forests with immense amounts of fuel, in the form of dead undergrowth, and powerful winds that spread fires until they are impossible to control.

Weather, in other words.

There are a thousand indicators that this thing is real and going full blast right now. And they are everywhere. I live in a major apple growing region along the southern shore of Lake Ontario. This year the harvest season is a full ten days earlier than historical averages.

That may not seem like a big problem but there are logistics involved in dealing with a perishable crop that must get to market or processors in a limited amount of time or it will be lost. An entire industry is dependent on getting it right.

In the scheme of things, that is a relatively tiny result of a changing climate caused by man (don’t even begin to tell me this is normal, there are mountains of data showing it is far from it). But it’s not tiny if you are a farmer, and farming is big business.

The right and the oil business have made a deal with the devil known as reality. They will pretend reality is not real in exchange for short term profits and political power. And they will screw their own people, including their own grandchildren, in the process. It’s inconceivably selfish.

If you have drank the kool aid of climate denial, I respectfully suggest you pay a little more attention to what is actually happening instead of what you are told by self-serving, biased news media. Don’t get all your information from one news source or what your friends are saying. And take a look at your insurance bills, if you can even get insurance.

You might find that they are going way up while coverage is going way down. If you live in blue California or red Florida, you know how bad it’s getting. When the insurance giants pull out, they are telling you that this is real. They don’t care if you are Democrat or Republican or what you believe, they follow the facts.

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