Mike Pence's Climate-Change Two-Step Shows Removing Trump Won't Fix the Republican Party's Issues
Despite what you might hear from one Democratic presidential candidate in particular, getting Donald Trump out of the world's most powerful job is not some magic potion that will cure the Republican Party's various ills. Trump is a very good representation of the party as currently constituted, because the party has been moving in this direction for decades and because, thanks to some combination of cowardice and cynicism and greed and ambition, pretty much every Republican has agreed to defend everything he says and does-or say nothing at all.
If you need proof of that, check out his vice president on Jake Tapper's State of the Union yesterday. Mike Pence showed himself to be an archetypal Trump defender, employing doublespeak and nonsense to wriggle out of questions about, say, the camps the United States of America is running at its southern border. (The veep suggested that "of course" the Trump administration believes migrant kids deserve soap and toothbrushes, days after a Trump Justice Department lawyer argued in court that they didn't. When asked about the lawyer, Pence said he can't speak for the lawyer-who is, in fact, speaking for Pence and the administration.) But the real peach came when Tapper pressed Pence on whether he agreed with Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats's assessment that the climate crisis poses a grave threat to peace and stability for human civilization.
Mike Pence repeatedly refused to answer a simple question: Is man-made climate change a threat?
Why won’t Pence admit this? pic.twitter.com/niR1AegnZH- Renato Mariotti (@renato_mariotti) June 23, 2019
"Well, what I will tell you is we'll always follow the science on that in this administration," Pence said. Incredibly, Tapper did not do a spit-take. This is the same administration that planned to create a Presidential Committee on Climate Security which was essentially tasked with questioning the findings of climate scientists-and the Pentagon-that climate change is real and poses a national security risk. (As proof this isn't new for Republicanism, the Bush administration also meddled in climate reports.) It was supposed to be led by William Happer, a former Princeton physicist and climate denier who, in 2014, said on television that "the demonization of carbon dioxide is just like the demonization of the poor Jews under Hitler." That panel was part of a multi-pronged effort to attack climate science on the part of this administration, which Pence says follows the science.
Our vice president went on to tell Tapper that, essentially, there are Many Fine Scientists on Both Sides.
TAPPER: Do you think it's a threat? Man-made climate emergency-is it a threat?
PENCE: I think the answer to that is going to be based upon the science.
TAPPER: Well, the science says yes. I'm asking you what you think.
PENCE: Well, there's many in the science that-
TAPPER: The science community in your own administration-at NOAA, at the DNI-they all say it's a threat. But you won't, for some reason.
PENCE: What the president has said-what we've said-is that we're not going to raise utility rates. Remember what President Obama said? He had his climate-change plan, he said it's necessarily going to cause rates to skyrocket. And that would force us into these green technologies. You've got Democrats all running for president on a Green New Deal that would break this economy.
The way you can tell it will not get better if Trump is evicted from 1600 Pennsylvania is that his vice president deploys the same avalanche-of-lies tactics to defend his refusal to address a crisis that poses a threat to human civilization as we know it. Attack your opponent with every line of rhetoric imaginable, even if they're in conflict. The point is not to persuade, it's to bludgeon them into submission. The truth is simple, however: man-made climate change is real and must be addressed or it will continue to destabilize our world with escalating ferocity.
And yet Pence could not even say it's a threat. He waffled on the scientific consensus that it is real. He pivoted to a claim about how Obama intended to "skyrocket" utility rates-which appears to reference a cap-and-trade plan Pence himself first attacked, with the same line of rhetoric, in 2009. That plan did not pass and is not in effect. There is obviously no evidence that the Green New Deal would "break the economy," which is a child's assessment. For instance, wind and solar power are now cheaper than coal in much of the United States, and getting cheaper by the week. And note the snide delivery on "green technologies," as if they're something to be mocked rather than the way to produce the energy we need while avoiding climate catastrophe.
But he was not done.
TAPPER: So you don't think it's a threat.
PENCE: I think we're making great progress reducing carbon emissions. America has the cleanest air and water in the world, we'll continue to use market-
TAPPER: It's not true. We don't have the cleanest air and water in the world.
Tapper is right. This zombie lie, which Pence borrowed from our president, will not go away. Trump frequently says things like "we're setting records environmentally," despite the fact that, according to the AP, air quality has not improved under his administration. Obama set the records in 2016. In 2017, Trump's first year, the number of “unhealthy days for ozone and fine particle pollution" in 35 major cities spiked 20 percent year-over-year. That's according to Trump's own EPA. According to the State of Global Air 2019 report cited by AP, we're eighth-best in terms of particle pollution, which kills 85,000 Americans every year. On overall environmental quality, Yale University’s global Environmental Performance Index ranked the U.S. 27th-though we're one of 10 countries tied for cleanest drinking water.
But none of that has anything to do with climate change, the topic at hand. Climate is about the carbon dioxide we're pumping into the atmosphere. Trumpists frequently release this red herring, maybe because, as you may have guessed, Pence's claim that we're "making progress on carbon emissions" is also a lie. U.S. emissions rose 3.4 percent in 2018-the biggest increase in eight years-after three straight years of decline. There were a number of factors involved, but surely the Trump administration's attempts to roll back federal regulations on emissions-including the attempts to defang the Clean Power Plan that Tapper mentioned-played some role.
But never mind all that. We've got to listen to the Vice President of the United States extol the virtues of "clean" coal-which is not real-in 2019, when the Midwest is submerged in biblical floods and the permafrost is melting 70 years early and the Arctic is turning into the Caribbean. The only goddamn sensible thing that Pence said is that nuclear power will, as it stands, probably need to be part of the mix if we want to cut emissions while supplying the energy we need. But the rest of it was the usual two-step.
Pence says, in one interview, that we're cutting emissions and we need to cut emissions but the science isn't settled and it's too costly to cut emissions and there's no point asking anyone to change anything because China and India. It seems like an improvement that Republicans now admit climate change is real and must be addressed, rather than that it's not real because it's cold outside. But with all the excuses and the bullshit, the end result is the same: do whatever it takes to keep burning fossil fuels for as long as possible. This policy just so happens to line up with the interests of folks who pay campaign bills.
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