Don’t Vote for the Anti-Earth Party
Sorry, you have no other choice
Around this time in an election cycle there is a typical widening of political parties’ tents that would allow undecided voters to slip under the hem of either one, unnoticed. Democrats allow for slightly more intense policing. Republicans fiddle with their definitions of unborn life and abortion timelines. And even on environmental issues we see some play. Democrats might float again a free-market carbon trading scheme or two. Republicans might stress innovation and entrepreneurship as the pathway to green (and profitable) technology.
But we’ve reached a point where whatever tent widening that goes on with respect to the environment needs to be outright ignored. The Republican party has gone on record as being anti-environment and pro-industry at any cost. Individual candidates may hem and haw on these points. But when the gavel lands and votes are cast, Republicans in Congress vote as a unified block. The unifying ideology of that block is a Trump-led pseudo-philosophy that denies the existence of climate change and looks upon any environmental regulation as an impingement on profit.
It’s true that the first presidential environmentalist was a Republican. Just as Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, was the first president to make slavery untenable, so too was Theodore Roosevelt…