Conspiracies, Corruption and Climate

In the wake of Hurricane Harvey, the head of Der  Trumpenführer's EPA said that it was "insensitive" to discuss climate change - and that was before the damage wrought by hurricane Irma.  Then, of course right wing blow hard Rush Limbaugh said that hurricanes were a "liberal conspiracy" - before he evacuated his very ample ass out of south Florida.  Indeed, almost everywhere on the right side of the political spectrum, one sees denial of climate changes reality and even any admission that warming temperatures and oceans are perhaps making storms more fearsome than in the past.  Why? Here's what  Leonard Pitts noted in a recent Miami Herald column:

So conservatives pretend science is somehow suspect when it says the planet is warming because of fossil fuels. And we should accept it as just — What? Coincidence? — that the fossil fuels industry donated $55.1 million to the Republicans in 2016 alone?

Once upon a time, the GOP and Republicans prided themselves on being the party of science, education and knowledge.  Then came the rise of the Christofascists - typically the least educated and most inclined to ignore objective reality - within the Party base.  Now what we see is grumblings about conspiracies and even the lunacy of blaming natural disasters on gays (I would counter, perhaps Trump voting states are being punished if god is so vengeful).  A column in the New York Times looks at the insane asylum that has become the Republican Party and the right wing political sphere. Here are excerpts:

After the devastation wreaked by Harvey on Houston — devastation that was right in line with meteorologists’ predictions — you might have expected everyone to take heed when the same experts warned about the danger posed by Hurricane Irma. But you would have been wrong.

On Tuesday, Rush Limbaugh accused weather scientists of inventing Irma’s threat for political and financial reasons: “There is a desire to advance this climate change agenda, and hurricanes are one of the fastest and best ways to do it,” he declared, adding that “fear and panic” help sell batteries, bottled water, and TV advertising.

He evacuated his Palm Beach mansion soon afterward.

In a way, we should be grateful to Limbaugh for at least raising the subject of climate change and its relationship to hurricanes, if only because it’s a topic the Trump administration is trying desperately to avoid. For example, Scott Pruitt, the pollution- and polluter-friendly head of the Environmental Protection Agency, says that now is not the time to bring up the subject — that doing so is “insensitive” to the people of Florida. Needless to say, for people like Pruitt there will never be a good time to talk about climate.

So what should we learn from Limbaugh’s outburst? Well, he’s a terrible person — but we knew that already. The important point is that he’s not an outlier. True, there weren’t many other influential people specifically rejecting warnings about Irma, but denying science while attacking scientists as politically motivated and venal is standard operating procedure on the American right. When Donald Trump declared climate change a “hoax,” he was just being an ordinary Republican.

And thanks to Trump’s electoral victory, know-nothing, anti-science conservatives are now running the U.S. government. . . . . Almost every senior figure in the Trump administration dealing with the environment or energy is both an establishment Republican and a denier of climate change and of scientific evidence in general. [T]here is, after all, an overwhelming scientific consensus that human activities are warming the planet. When conservative politicians and pundits challenge that consensus, they do so not on the basis of careful consideration of the evidence — come on, who are we kidding? — but by impugning the motives of thousands of scientists around the world. All of these scientists, they insist, motivated by peer pressure and financial rewards, are falsifying data and suppressing contrary views. This is crazy talk. But it’s utterly mainstream on the modern right . . . . Why are U.S. conservatives so willing to disbelieve science and buy into tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories about scientists? Part of the answer is that they’re engaged in projection: That’s the way things work in their world. . . . . there was a time when some conservative intellectuals had interesting, independent ideas. But those days are long past: Today’s right-wing intellectual universe, such as it is, is dominated by hired guns who are essentially propagandists rather than researchers.

And right-wing politicians harass and persecute actual researchers whose conclusions they don’t like — an effort that has been vastly empowered now that Trump is in power.

[C]onservatives have grown increasingly hostile to science in general. Surveys show a steady decline in conservatives’ trust in science since the 1970s, which is clearly politically motivated — it’s not as if science has stopped working. The bottom line is that we are now ruled by people who are completely alienated not just from the scientific community, but from the scientific idea — the notion that objective assessment of evidence is the way to understand the world. And this willful ignorance is deeply frightening. Indeed, it may end up destroying civilization.