Several weeks ago, during one of the Republican Presidential debates, Senator Marco Rubio was asked about an endorsement he received from the Mayor of Miami, Florida that was accompanied by a plea from the Mayor that Rubio advocate a climate change policy which would curtail the flooding in that city.
In response, Rubio gave the standard answer of the climate change deniers, saying; “The reason the climate is changing is because the climate has always been changing. The climate’s never been the same it’s always changed. I don’t believe that human activity is the cause of all of these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it. And then, in any case, there is no law that can be passed that would have any effect on climate change. But I can tell you right now that I’m not going to destroy our economy.”
Parsing Rubio’s answer is interesting since the answer contains an acknowledgement that there have been “dramatic changes” in the climate which he attempts to assert are natural. In taking this position, Rubio has joined the ranks of climate deniers seeking the Presidency and senior members of his party. Both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are firm climate deniers. The former would abolish the Environmental Protection Agency. The latter would abolish the Department of Energy and has voted against every environmentally sound proposal. They join Senator James Inhofe R-Oklahoma. Inhofe is one of the most famous climate deniers, even writing a book claiming that the scientific evidence in support of climate change is a conspiracy to destroy the business economy. He is chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. He has compared the EPA to the Nazi Gestapo and its Administrator to the Japanese World War II propagandist, Tokyo Rose.
How did we get to this place?
The answer is simple. The United States Supreme Court in a series of decisions involving campaign financing has turned the American political system of campaigning into a giant cesspool. The Koch brothers, Koch industries and a network of wealthy like-minded donors have been allowed to secretly fund entities like Americans For Prosperity, the Club For Growth and create a number of tax deductible think tanks that specialize in specious research designed to oppose and weaken any regulation that threatens it’s business interests regardless of how sound the regulation is or the damage their corporate activity will cause to the environment. An excellent history of this activity is contained in Jane Mayer’s book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right .
The ironic part of all of this is that some of best scientific minds in America saw the crisis we would face decades ago.
As early as 1968 the scientist David M. Gates warned about global warming declaring that “We will go down in history known as an elegant technological society which underwent biological disintegration for lack of ecological understanding.” He painted a grim picture for the future of the planet that would become “half-starved, depressed billions gasping in air depleted of oxygen and laden with pollutants, thirsting for thickened blighted water.”
By 1977, Gates was sounding the alarm about fossil fuels saying that their continued use “…would mean warmer global climate, raise ocean levels.”
The question posed to Marco Rubio inn the Republican Presidential debate was predicated on a request by twenty-one mayors in Florida to CNN’s Jake Tapper that the issue of climate change be included in the debate because of rising sea levels. In the past year and a half the seal level along the Atlantic coast has risen five inches. The city of Miami Beach has spent 100 million dollars on sea defenses.
Maybe Rubio and his fellow climate change deniers are right. Maybe the science supporting global warming is unsettled.
Maybe the theory that the earth is round is unsettled too.