More Dysfunctional Deniers of the Climate Crisis
As you might expect, Fox News is driving the denial bus. And Fox’s naïve, gullible ultra-conservative viewers are on board for the ride. And there’s a bus stop in Texas.
America has the highest percentage of climate denial among first-world nations — behind only Indonesia and Saudi Arabia.
In evaluating why climate denial is so much more prevalent in America than in other wealthy countries, it’s important to consider the socio-political demographics of the U.S.
This is part three of a series of articles about climate crisis denial. Click here for part 2.
I also write about climate crisis complacency, an altogether different issue. Click here for those articles.
To access all my articles regarding the Climate Crisis, click here.
If you’re all caught up, let’s ponder how….
Climate crisis denial is high among the Republicans who watch Fox News
Tucker Carlson, formerly of Fox News, declared that Liberals don’t “really believe in global warming” because “the entire theory is absurd, and they know it.”
Laura Ingraham told her Fox News viewers, “It’s, hot, hot, hot, all right. After all, we’re in the middle of a season called ‘summer.”
The percentage of rank-and-file Republicans who think global warming is caused by human activity has declined over the last two decades. These days, 70% of Republicans say climate change is a minor threat or no threat at all.
62% of Republicans watch Fox News. And consistent with the demographic breakdown of American climate denial, Fox News viewers are overwhelmingly older (over 55) and white — as are climate deniers.
One survey found that Republicans who watch Fox News are more than twice as likely to deny human-caused climate change than Republican non-viewers.
In short, the unusual level of climate denial in America is heavily concentrated among the Fox News viewership demographic of old white conservatives. And Republicans who watch the network are highly likely to deny human-caused global warming.
Climate crisis denial is common among the Republican leadership
High-ranking Republicans are happy to present their denial of the climate crisis. Here are a few examples:
Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) has accused Climate Envoy John Kerry of being a “grifter,” trying to charge taxpayers “a quadrillion dollars to fix a problem that doesn’t exist.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis remarked that stronger hurricanes are “a fact of life in the Sunshine State. I’ve always rejected the politicization of the weather.”
During a hearing of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-S.C.) declared that “Every time you have soil or rock or whatever it is deposited into the seas, that forces the sea levels to rise, because now you have less space in these oceans, because the bottom is moving up.”
Trump, who has frequently called climate change “a hoax,” recently opined that it “may affect us in 300 years.”
Climate crisis deniers welcome ‘clean energy’ investments
As of November 2023, at least a dozen Republican members of Congress have welcomed clean energy investments flowing to their electorates.
This group includes House of Representatives members Nancy Mace, Clay Higgins, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who have all recently praised the arrival of new renewable energy, battery or electric vehicle jobs in their districts. This praise comes after voting against President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in 2022.
The passage of the IRA — which includes significant tax credits and other support to bolster clean energy such as solar and wind as well as the manufacturing of components of clean energy such as electric car batteries — has been widely denounced by the GOP.
And the Republican leadership of the House of Representatives continues its attempts to dismantle key provisions of the IRA. Yet despite its rebuke, enthusiasm from GOP House members flows forth for the benefits that the IRA provides in the form of clean energy jobs within their districts.
Mace, a South Carolina lawmaker, called the IRA “absurd” and a “fiasco” but more recently has issued glowing statements about the carmaker Volvo boosting its electric vehicle production and a scheme to further electrify public transit.
Higgins, meanwhile, denounced the IRA as a “monstrosity” but welcomed the arrival of a $ 1 billion solar manufacturing plant that broke ground in his state of Louisiana in September 2023.
Taylor Greene, the far-right extremist from Georgia, has called the climate bill “extremely dangerous” but then lauded the “fantastic” decision of QCells, a solar company, to expand its manufacturing base in her district.
The GOP attacks on the IRA are ramping up now that the House of Representatives has a new speaker, in the form of Mike Johnson — a rightwing representative from Louisiana who has received more money in donations from oil and gas interests than any other industry.
It is important to note that Johnson has previously rejected a basic understanding of climate science, falsely suggesting that the world is heating up due to natural cycles. He was also critical of the U.S. involvement in the Paris climate agreement, which Toxic Trump scrapped when he became president in 2017.
Climate crisis deniers seek government aid when nature strikes
Texas is the largest emitter of greenhouse gasses in the U.S. — twice the amount produced by California. If Texas were a country, it would be the world’s eighth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases.
Meanwhile, over the years, many of Texas’s leading politicians have denied the overwhelming science that humans — and the burning of fossil fuels — are to blame for rising global temperatures.
Some Republican lawmakers in Texas have reached new levels of hypocrisy when it comes to their denial of the climate crisis while requesting federal aid for damage caused by catastrophic climatic events.
In 2017 — as part of an increasing climate trend of slower, wetter, more intense storms — Hurricane Harvey dumped up to sixty inches of rain on some of Houston’s suburbs and inflicted $125 billion in damage on surrounding Harris County. The rainfall was so extreme because Harvey lingered over the area for days.
Hurricane Florence moved at the pace of a leisurely jogger once it hit Texas’s coast in 2018, followed by Hurricane Sally in 2020, Ida in 2021, and Ian in 2022. And in April 2023, a tropical system parked itself over Fort Lauderdale for 12 hours, drowning the city in over twenty-five inches of rain.
Undoubtedly, the recent storms throughout Texas are harbingers rather than never-to-be-repeated anomalies. This region of the Gulf Coast that includes Texas has seen the fastest sea level rise on the planet — some two feet in the last hundred years.
From sea level rise and hurricanes to extreme heat, Texas is one of the most threatened states in the U.S. when it comes to the impacts of climate change. Texas has ranked first in the number of billion-dollar disasters per year since 2001.
A 2020 analysis of America’s 3,000 counties showed that, of the 135 counties deemed most at risk from a changing climate, 24 are in Texas. And in that group is Harris County — the third most populous county in the U.S.
In my article regarding “Democratic Socialism” (click here for that article) I address how far-right conservatives completely reject this aspect of our American democracy. Yet it is our democratic socialistic system that often provides federal aid and assistance when natural catastrophes strike.
And so, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, and the state’s two senators, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, have set the new standard for climate crisis audacity when pleading for democratic socialism to pay for the climate crisis taking place all around their ‘Lone Star’ state.
Abbott and the Texas legislature have always done everything they could to slow the shift to green energy renewables while continuing to promote fossil fuels. And, despite their dismissing the threat of global warming, Abbott, Cornyn, and Cruz have lobbied vigorously for the federal government to pay the lion’s share of hugely expensive coastal defenses to protect Galveston and surrounding areas from sea level rise and mega-storms associated with climate change.
To adapt to a world changed by the climate crisis, Texas must build up its defenses. And ever since a plan to bolster coastal defenses around Galveston was first developed following the $30 billion damage inflicted by Hurricane Ike in 2008, Abbott, Cornyn, and Cruz have been trying to get federal help (i.e., democratic socialistic aid) to fund the massive infrastructure project.
Texas politicians are looking to the federal government to shoulder the lion’s share of over $60 billion in estimated costs for better storm and flooding infrastructure projects resulting from a threat they’ve been actively ignoring — and making worse.
The Army Corps of Engineers is the part of the federal government responsible for overseeing these types of civil works projects nationwide. And Texas is looking to the Army Corps to cover most of the bill to build structures to stand against future attacks from climate change. The problem is that the Corps has many such proposals coming at it, and its current backlog is already many times its annual budget.
Texas politicians seem to believe that voters around the country will be more than happy to subsidize climate change adaptation projects in a state whose leaders are doing their best to make the problem worse.
Perhaps after a few more ‘weather extremes,’ Texas voters will begin to think twice about electing leaders who fail to recognize the true gravity of the climate crisis in their Lone Star state.
