We’re experiencing a tropical heat wave. There is also a temperate heat wave and an Arctic heat wave, with temperatures in northern Norway reaching the high 80s. The Western United States’ megadrought has reduced Lake Mead to a fraction of its former size, and it now threatens to become a “dead pool” incapable of supplying water to major cities. Climate change is already wreaking havoc, and it’s only a matter of time before we see massive disasters that claim thousands of lives.
And the Supreme Court’s Republican majority has just voted to limit the Biden administration’s ability to act.
It says something about the state of American politics that a number of environmental experts I follow were relieved by the ruling, which was less sweeping than they had feared but still left the administration with some options for climate action. Given where we are, I suppose objectively bad decisions must be graded on a curve.
For what it’s worth, I suspect that at least some of the Republican justices recognized the enormity of what they were doing and tried to do as little as possible while remaining loyal to their party.
Because, of course, this is all about party loyalty. Anyone who believes that the recent string of landmark court decisions reflects any coherent legal theory is being willfully naive: Clearly, how the law is interpreted by this court is almost entirely determined by what serves Republican interests. If states want to prohibit abortion, that is their prerogative. If New York has a law that restricts concealed carrying of firearms, it is unconstitutional.
And partisanship is at the heart of climate policy. Yes, Joe Manchin is impeding the advancement of Biden’s climate agenda. But if even a handful of Republican senators were willing to support climate action, Manchin and the Supreme Court would be irrelevant: To encourage the transition to a green economy, simple legislation could establish regulations limiting greenhouse gas emissions, provide subsidies, and possibly even impose taxes. So, ultimately, our inaction in the face of what appears to be a looming apocalypse is due to the G.O.P.’s adamant opposition to any kind of action.
The question is, how did allowing the planet to burn become a key tenet of the G.O.P.
It wasn’t always like this. Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency, whose authority the court has recently limited. As recently as 2008, Republican presidential candidate John McCain campaigned on a promise to implement a cap-and-trade system to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
The Republican position on the environment is also diametrically opposed to that of mainstream conservative parties in other Western countries. One study from a few years ago found that most conservative parties support climate action and that the Republican Party “is an anomaly in denying anthropogenic climate change.” And, yes, the G.O.P. is still in climate denial; it will occasionally admit that climate change is real while insisting that nothing can be done about it, but it will revert to denial whenever there is a cold spell.
So, what accounts for the Republican climate disparity? One obvious solution is to “follow the money”: During the 2020 election cycle, the oil and gas industry contributed 84 percent of its political contributions to Republicans, while coal mining contributed 96 percent.
However, I believe that money is only part of the story; in fact, the correlation may run the other way, with the fossil fuel industry supporting Republicans because they are anti-environment, rather than the other way around.
A couple of observations have led to my skepticism about a simple follow-the-money story. One reason is that Republicans have staked out anti-science positions on other issues, such as Covid vaccination, where monetary considerations are far less obvious: the coronavirus, as far as I know, isn’t a major source of campaign contributions.
Furthermore, while the Republican position on climate change differs from that of “normal” conservative parties, it is typical of right-wing populist parties. (Aside: I despise the term “populist” in this context because Republicans have shown no interest in policies that would benefit workers. But I guess we’ll have to live with it.)
In other words, climate policy politics resemble those of authoritarian government and minority rights: the Republican Party resembles Hungary’s Fidesz or Poland’s Law and Justice more than the center-right parties labeled conservative in other countries.
Why are authoritarian right-wing parties hostile to the environment? That’s a topic for another day. What’s critical right now is that the United States is the only major country in which an authoritarian right-wing party — which has lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections but controls the Supreme Court — has the ability to obstruct actions that could avert climate disaster.
