From our community:
“I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that”. Gus Speth
America’s chickens are coming home to roost when it comes to the impacts from human-caused climate change. In the western and mid-western red states, GOP voters turned out en masse in 2016 to vote for the climate-denying GOP and helped elect the most unqualified, ignorant and divisive POTUS this country has ever had the misfortune to experience. As a result of the GOP electoral success, all of us have descended into a race to the bottom on just about every critical issue that faces us. But when it comes to climate change, they have bitten themselves in the ass. Bigly!
Republican voters tend to be quite proud of their ignorance, their sense of superiority over the rest of us, their lack of empathy, and they make horrible decisions as a result. According to a new Gallup poll, a mind blowing 69% of Republicans are incapable of processing the basic threats from a changing climate to the detriment of us all. This, even as they experience the worsening effects from changing rainfall patterns and increasing temperatures in their vulnerable part of the world. It is stunning and depressing. Their ignorance has only gotten worse since “Dear Leader” was elected, wherein he immediately pulls out of the Paris Climate Agreement, appoints the vile opportunists Ryan Zinke, Jeff Sessions, Rick Perry and Scott Pruitt to be the nations top environmental caretakers, as well as scrubbing all references of climate and environmental science from government websites. You betcha I am pissed off!
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what I think or what a GOP voter thinks. When it comes down to it, only the physics of climate change matters. It is a crying shame that fossil fuel interests have been successful in making science and reason a partisan issue.
Rant over. Story below.