In a momentous turnaround for the GOP, the Associated Press reports that House Republicans, including Speaker Kevin McCarthy, now agree that climate change is real, and they’re willing to do anything they possibly can to combat it except reduce greenhouse emissions or transition to renewable energy or much of anything, really. But they support planting a trillion trees, so that’s nice. Especially for the lumber and paper industries.
McCarthy shared the “new” Republican “thinking” on climate while visiting a natural gas drilling site in Ohio. We will now stop putting ironic scare quotes around all the obvious lies, to conserve precious electrons.
You will also be happy to know that the AP isn’t fooled by any of the new GOP greenwashing either. Of the trillion trees plan, the skepticism is right there near the top:
The idea — simple yet massively ambitious — revealed recent Republican thinking on how to address climate change. The party is no longer denying that global warming exists, yet is searching for a response to sweltering summers, weather disasters and rising sea levels that doesn’t involve abandoning their enthusiastic support for American-produced energy from burning oil, coal and gas.
McCarthy’s idea of clean energy is to export American methane (so-called “natural” gas — damn, it’s hard to avoid the quotation marks there) all over the world so we can beat Russian methane gas, so we’ll “not only have a cleaner world, let’s have a safer world.”
This is where we remind you that while methane-burning power plants do indeed have lower carbon emissions than coal, they still release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, increasing the rate of global warming. You don’t really achieve a shit-free sandwich by using slightly less shit.
The AP explains where this trillion trees idea originated:
A 2019 study suggested that planting trees to suck up heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere could be one of the most effective ways to fight climate change. Major conservation groups, and former President Donald Trump, who downplayed humanity’s role in climate change, embraced the idea.
But the tree-planting push has drawn intense pushback from environmental scientists who call it a distraction from cutting emissions from fossil fuels. The authors of the original study have also clarified that planting trees does not eliminate “the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
There’s also the not-insignificant detail that you’d need roughly the area of the entire USA to do it, although of course most of the US land mass is needed for gas drilling rigs and pipelines, plus parking for the largest 4X4 pickups possible.
In short, planting trees is nice. Trees do indeed sequester carbon from the air, and we need to do that. But it’s also worth next to nothing if we aren’t also transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources as quickly as possible.
If the tub is overflowing, the solution is to turn off the tap, not to promise you’ll bring a lot of sponges so the bathroom floor floods a little more slowly. And if you do bring sponges, you sure as hell don’t get to open the tap wider.
House Republicans have made no secret of their real priority, which is to keep fossil fuel companies profitable no matter how much harm results. After Republicans grudgingly settled on McCarthy as speaker, they introduced a fossil fuels promotion bill, the “Lower Energy Costs Act,” as HR 1 — the symbolic top dawg of legislative priorities. It aims to ramp up US production not only of methane gas, but also coal and oil. Stapling a picture of a tree to that agenda doesn’t significantly change things.
The bill passed in March in the GOP-controlled House, and because it includes a few items that will be useful to clean energy, like ramping up US mining of lithium and other elements that can be used in EV batteries, the Goopers are touting it as a clean energy bill, again seriously straining our resolve on on the whole no-scare-quotes thing.
As another f’rinstance, Republicans insist that if we export more US fossil fuels, which are allegedly less polluting (but not significantly lower in carbon) than those from other countries, then hooray we’ve reduced carbon emissions. It’s the logic of a two-pack-a-day smoker who points at the little filter and says they’re living healthier than when they smoked Pall Malls.
Previously! House Republicans Form 'Conservative Climate Caucus' To Save Planet For Rich People
The GOP’s Green New Spiel is also being pushed by Rep. John Curtis, who a couple years back founded the Conservative Climate Caucus to promote “market-based climate solutions” (couldn’t help myself) that would only nibble around the edges of the crisis, like planting trees and promoting nuclear power. As we said at the time, the problem is that incremental free-markety changes might have been helpful but not enough 30 years ago, but now they’re unlikely to even sequester as much carbon as a fig leaf.
Curtis is here again in the AP story, sounding like he’s trying to sell a 1972 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser wagon to a shopper who came in looking for a Prius Prime:
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“I keep reminding Republicans that H.R. 1 made energy affordable, reliable, and clean. […] We’re very quick to point out that it made it affordable and reliable. Sometimes we forget to remind people: yes, and clean. That’s an important part.”
Did he point out that with no catalytic converter, it, uh, gets better mileage, too? Less to go wrong, you know!
Even with such occasional flailing gestures at “clean,” the GOP’s attitude on the whole is closer to that of Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pennsylvania crude), the head of the House Freedom Caucus, who said in a hearing last week that Biden’s climate policies are aimed at “a problem that doesn’t exist,” and who accuses leaders calling for CO2 reductions of “grifting.”
Not only have Republicans tried — but so far failed — to reverse Biden’s signature climate policies, they also added a measure to the annual Defense Bill that would prohibit the Pentagon from taking any action on climate, because climate science is just a load of “wokeness,” even if the Defense Department has recognized it for decades as both a threat to international stability and to military readiness, seeing as how it’s difficult to launch fighter jets from airbases that are underwater.
Nonetheless, we should expect some Republicans to keep sounding like oil company commercials that claim they’re committed to clean energy. The sharper ones know just how toxic outright climate denial is with voters, especially this year, when every single day brings new heat records, and extreme weather events are the new normal. But they also don’t have anything to offer, really. Yes, plant trees, that’s great. But we need to close the fossil fuel spigot, and no amount of happy talk about incrementally less-polluting energy will change that.
[AP / E&E News /Image: "Indie_charles,” public domain]
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Full Disclosure: When I was in college, there was a derelict 1965 or so Olds Vista Cruiser parked and decaying outside the little shitbox apartment where I lived in Flagstaff. I would gladly take one today and convert it to an EV using GM's e-crate motor and drivetrain that's designed to replace a short-block engine. Instead, I'll have to settle for someday converting Vlad the Impala
FACT CHECK: The wikimedia page for the smoke-belching plant up there identifies it as "industry," so the subheading's suggestion that it's just "happy little trees in the corner of the refinery" is not a factual statement.