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How the Republicans Silenced the Democrats after Harvey

More than half of Americans believe that climate change is responsible for the severity of recent hurricanes, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll published on October 20,2017.  At the time 55 percent of the American people believed that it was climate change that was responsible for the severity of the 2017 hurricane season. The poll, ABC News/Washington Post, found that 41% believed the severity of the tropical cyclones was “just the kind of weather that happens from time to time.

Medium posted a story by Genevieve Guenther, shortly after the powerful hurricanes, Harvey and Irma, hit the US mainland. Guenther wrote her must read piece prior to Hurricane Maria, (along with Irma), devastating the Caribbean where millions of people are still suffering to this day. Republican’s, particularly Scott Pruitt and Rick Scott, all indignantly slapped down any mention of climate change at the times these storms made landfall. Many in the press also felt those words were not to be mentioned while “people are suffering”. How dismissive of the most serious threat to a livable planet since the beginning of humanity. Only a few lonely Democratic senators were brave enough to speak the truth.

Yet most Democratic politicians apparently agreed that the suffering caused by Harvey and Irene required them not to speak of the storms’ relationship to climate change. According to an article reported by Emily Holden and Elana Schor on Politico, the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Tom Carper of Delaware, essentially repeated Pruitt’s message, sounding cowed and passive as he hoped for future in which American politicians would finally study what climate scientists are already discussing today: “When we’ve done a good deal more work in terms of cleanup and getting folks’ lives back to normal,” Carper said, “I hope we do a deep dive into whether or not the warming in the Gulf of Mexico is really what’s causing this.” Even Sheldon Whitehouse, the climate hawk senator from Rhode Island, rearticulated a version of Pruitt’s predatory delay: “We have a lot of time to make that point [about climate],” Whitehouse said in a brief interview. To be fair, Whitehouse also said that “we should be talking about this issue on a regular basis,” and other Democratic Senators went even further. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand reiterated that “we cannot ignore that carbon emissions are causing our ocean temperatures to get warmer, which is fueling more powerful hurricanes.” And on Twitter Brian Schatz from Hawaii called out the Republican party for “refusing moral and political responsibility for the planet itself.” But even Bernie Sanders (or perhaps his Twitter staffer) seemed to concede Pruitt’s premise that right after a hurricane is not the time to discuss climate change. “Our job today,” Sanders tweeted, is to “make sure lives are saved in Houston. Our job tomorrow: understand the role that climate change has played in this tragedy.” Tomorrow is too late when the scientists tell us that we have delayed action on climate change for so long that we have now only a 5% chance of halting global warming at 2°C.

So Republican messaging led Democratic Senators to delay discussing climate change (forget about offering policy solutions to the problem) while everyone’s attention was focused on the horror of hurricanes and floods. How were they able to do this? Part of the answer lies in the way that Pruitt and the Republicans mastered the representation of time: their message effectively appropriated people suffering from the effects of climate change right now. Scrambling the temporality of climate cause and effect, they argued that the effect of climate change needs to be dealt with today but the cause of the suffering needs to be dealt with later. (This temporal scrambling seems like a coordinated strategy, evident also in Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossert’s Orwellian assertion that “we continue to take climate change seriously, not the cause of it, but what we can see right now.”)

snip

So, Democratic politicians, let the Republicans talk about “the people.” Let Democrats and climate-hawk politicians of all parties talk about the children. Find children affected by hurricanes and floods, and talk about them on TV. Better yet, find children affected by hurricanes and floods who are also worried about climate change, and interview them on TV. Put them in advertisements. Make them your focus. Make yourself their protectors. And don’t be afraid to be accused of cynicism: if you really do work to advance policies that will fight climate change, and if you campaign to generate support for those policies, your casting yourselves as working for the immediate self-interest of voters by protecting and improving the lives of their children will be unassailable. Indeed, it will be your impenetrable armor. Because, above all else, it will actually be true.


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