Just as Congress leaves for its summer recess, two government reports have been issued concerning global warming. In the year of the great Gulf of Mexico Oil Well Catastrophe, in a decade that continues to be much warmer than normal, in a time when the planet's atmosphere is perhaps at the tipping point toward a larger catastrophe, Congress was unable to pass a modest carbon tax. Conservatives - Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats - simply cannot summon the will to address this issue. As any student of the American legislative process knows, the Congress will always take the path of least resistance. With campaign donations from the carbon industry in play, legislators seem unwilling to address our larger needs in this mid-term election year. Until the public opinion is marshaled to do battle with the deniers and their corporate sponsors, the planet will continue to bake.
How did the climate change deniers come to dominate the discourse? No doubt economic insecurity is a factor: with unemployment numbers still rising, public sentiment can easily be marshaled to oppose anything that might cost coal miners and oil rig drillers some jobs. But the famed "paranoid style of American politics" phenomenon may also be at work. As Richard Hofstadter famously articulated in his seminal work, Americans have a long history of courting the irrational in our politics. It is so much easier to give in to the paranoia than to reason together. No wonder Congress was so hot to get out of town.
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