Believing In Deadly Policies For Pride's Sake

THE PENTAGON lists climate change as the single greatest threat to national security. For climate change deniers who refuse to believe this, a little research should be sufficient to tell you whether this is true. The U'S. Navy says that it will be necessary to relocate the world's largest naval base at Norfolk, Virginia, due to rising sea levels eventually inundating the base's buildings. Several times a month teenagers go kayaking above roads near the beach, as the ocean regularly floods the city sewer system. Every year averages temperatures are hotter than the previous, as the atmosphere's carbon content keeps rising, now well above four hundred parts per million, a dangerous amount. Above four fifty, and the ecosystem cannot bear it, and will collapse. all of these facts can easily be verified, with a little research. And yet, anyone who accepts the reality of human made climate change is not allowed to work in the Trump administration, an administration which was elected by a large plurality of American voters, and which still has the approval of a third of all Americans. Trump has repeatedly declared his intention to "bring back coal", even as cola fired plants shut down one after another. Coal is never coming back, as is obvious to anyone who pays attention, without massive government subsidies, which are anathema among conservatives, and to the spirit of free market capitalism. Does everyone see the problem here? Everyone, at least, with the probably exception of hard right conservatives and Trump supporters, dwindling in number. A massive disconnect between what the world knows to be true, and the policies promulgated by the Trump administration. a massive conflict between what needs to be done, and what the American government is currently doing. The existence and existential threat of climate change was apparent long ago, decades ago. That carbon injected into earth's atmosphere could cause atmospheric warming was known to chemists two hundred years ago, and Einstein actually thought that deliberately adding carbon to increase agricultural yield might be a good idea. Even Einstein was sometimes wrong. The pattern is that American conservatives cling desperately to obviously damaging attitudes because to abandon them would conflict with their ideology. On the issues of climate change, gun control, economic and tax policy, among others, America's right wing refuses to open its mind to better policy, merely for the sake of ideology. On most ideas, the result id greatly detrimental to the health and well being of the nation, In the realm of climate change, the conservative attitude, that it is not a serious problem, more than detrimental; it is lethal.