As Kansas City broils, how did fighting climate change for our kids turn political? | Opinion

Kansas City is sweltering as the mercury dances up to the triple digits, and it isn’t even July quite yet. Midwesterners are wearing masks in public again — but this time, it’s because of the smoke from Canadian wildfires shrouding Chicago and Cleveland in a haze, not a virus in the air. Wheat farmers are suffering from a historic drought that’s threatening harvests this year once more, and a major new study from Kansas State University has a sobering forecast about the future of agriculture across all of the Great Plains: Even short bouts of hot, dry and windy weather — aka HDW events — take a measurable toll on harvests. And climate change is making those events more frequent.

No, the weather isn’t the same as the climate. And no, this isn’t the first time we’ve pushed 100 so early in the summer. But farmers have known for years that big changes are already affecting their way of life. The Ogallala Aquifer that stretches from Wyoming through western Kansas down to Texas is drying out. Well levels are running low, and that threatens the ability to water the crops that keep food on our tables and clothes on our backs.

The nation’s military leaders also recognize that climate change is real, and has a significant effect on the nation’s ability to protect itself. A warmer world means more incidents of severe weather. One of those was the March 2019 Missouri River flood that caused nearly half a billion dollars’ worth of damage at Nebraska’s Offutt Air Force Base, home to the U.S. Strategic Command.

There are few values more near and dear to traditional American ideals than our abilities to feed and defend ourselves. So it’s especially disheartening to continue to hear the drumbeat of supposedly “conservative” politicians and pundits framing climate change as just another culture war battle. The health of our planet isn’t a right-versus-left debate. And the people whose livelihoods rely on the seasons have already adjusted to shifting realities.

But unfortunately, expressing concern about our warming world too often feels like a condemnation of the conveniences of modern life. Who doesn’t enjoy crisp, frosty air conditioning, or the luxury and just plain fun of hopping into a gas-powered car to drive anywhere we want on a whim?

Progressives saw former Vice President Al Gore’s campaign against global warming, documented in the movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” as a needed prod to get American society moving in the right direction away from petroleum and toward greener energy sources. But many of those on the conservative side of the aisle viewed it as a sore loser in the 2000 election delivering a condescending, finger-wagging lecture, telling them they should feel guilty about their lifestyles. It was a major turning point in the politicization of how we care for the planet.

Republican Nixon created Environmental Protection Agency

It was Republican President Richard Nixon who established the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, in response to widespread air and water pollution that made the country look “like a giant garbage dump,” in the words of former GOP EPA head Christine Todd Whitman.

That was then. Today, opposition to environmental concerns has become a regular weapon in Republican officials’ fight against the “woke” boogeyman. Sen. Roger Marshall warned that President Joe Biden wants to “send his climate demagogues to Kansas & tell us which cars we can drive,” while Missouri’s Sen. Eric Schmitt declared flatly, “Climate Alarmism is a cult.”

This almost-180 from the GOP’s previous public positions on the environment is the obvious evolution of Donald Trump’s 2012 declaration that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” He later walked back his “joke,” but maintained that “China does not do anything to help climate change. They burn everything you could burn; they couldn’t care less.”

That blanket assertion is as broad as it is bigoted, but as with many things Trump says, offers a glimmer of truth: His administration walked back more than 100 pollution regulations, but at least the United States still has an EPA. And if you’re the kind of person who thinks America should be a beacon of leadership to the entire world, you should also hope it sets an example for developing nations to step up and be proactive to start reversing some of the damage we’ve already done to our home.

The U.S. is already the clear global leader — in carbon dioxide emissions. And regardless of the fossil fuel industry’s decades of propaganda, echoed by credulous right-wing media outlets and the army of lobbyists paid to feed them, burning petroleum is the decisive factor driving warming temperatures.

Republican former secretary of defense and Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel — a longtime recipient of help from Kansas’ fracking and refinery pioneer Koch Industries — now realizes Big Oil companies know the truth about their products, but lie about it. “And yes, I was misled,” he said. Those lies helped spur him and other leaders to slow-walk action to mitigate the damage.

We realize many of the comforts of our lives today are built on a foundation of generating dirty energy. But every day we oppose efforts for a greener future is another day our children and grandchildren will sweat, toil and suffer as they try to fix our short-sighted mistakes. There’s nothing conservative about that.