Hopefully, you have better things to do on this beautiful day than watch senators bloviate on CSPAN. However, you should know that the Senate is spending six hours today debating whether or not the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can regulate greenhouse producing emissions under provisions of the Clean Air Act. The Supreme Court says they can, but Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, whose state suffers most from global warming but also is totally dependent on the oil and gas industries, has introduced a resolution to take that power away from the Executive Branch. So far, I’ve noticed that Democratic senators Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson, and Jay Rockefeller plan on supporting the measure.
What’s most remarkable about the debate, however, is not that a few Democrats support the resolution. What’s remarkable is that one Republican after another is taking to the floor to dispute that global warming or climate change is occurring at all, that it wouldn’t matter if it was occurring, and that we’re powerless to do anything about it anyway.
I mean it’s not about debate a policy, but a debate about whether science counts for anything. As Bernie Sanders asked on the Senate floor, if all our science-producing agencies are producing inaccurate information, then why are we funding them?
But that’s the problem with the current incarnation of the Republican Party. They don’t have any grounding in reality. And, even the few who do are perfectly content to pretend they don’t. How can a political party run our government and all its agencies if they won’t accept their findings?
I’m telling you, this is why I have decided that the biggest threat facing our country is the mentality of the Republican Party and the prospect that they might take power again and try to implement their twisted version of reality on the nation and the world. You thought the Bush administration was bad? You thought Tom DeLay was a nut? Just wait for the next group. You ain’t seen nothing yet.
