Melt the planet: shock reality of Republicans’ midterm win

It is an unparalleled act of sabotage that could end up “melting the planet” if you accept the worst-case scenario.

Quite simply, the Republicans look set to mark their takeover of both houses on Capitol Hill in last week’s midterm elections by blocking, stymying and/or dismantling every effort President Obama has made during his presidency to deal with the consequences of climate change.

As for the "historic" targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions announced overnight by Obama and President Xi of China, they are rendered meaningless: a Republican majority in both houses looks certain tio kill any chance of America taking the lead in, or even participating in, a global effort to ameliorate or counter the effects of climate change.

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The Republicans want to strip away controls on industrial pollution, encourage drilling everywhere there may be a drop of profitable oil, and, if there are consequences, leave them to God because it’s his planet anyway.

It must look like farce from the other side of the Atlantic where Germany is proving that you can light up cities with renewable energy and even China, the world's largest polluter, is finally prepared to set a target - the year 2030 - for carbon dioxide emissions to peak.

Here in America, on the other hand, the Republicans plan to remove incentives even to put solar panels on your roof. The idea is to abort any household savings from going green, the better to maintain the markets for the big corporations, who make bigger profits burning coal. No kidding.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who will become the leader of the Senate in January, told his local newspaper, the Lexington Herald-Leader, that he feels a “deep responsibility” to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating carbon dioxide emissions at coal-burning power plants. He added: “It makes me very angry, and I'm going to do everything I can to try to stop them."

One of the newly-minted Republican senators on McConnell’s benches will be Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, a state which has more “mountain top removal” coalmines and more poor white people than anywhere else in America. On Sunday, she told Fox News that she will be “extremely aggressive” in her efforts to remove the pollution regulations.

“The president’s [environmental] policies are disenfranchising my part of the country,” Capito said. “We’ve been picked as a loser, and I’m not going to stand for it. Rolling back the EPA regulations is the way to do it.”

As for Obama's climate agreement with China, Sen McConnell wasted no time in shouting it down.

“Our economy can’t take the president’s ideological war on coal that will increase the squeeze on middle-class families and struggling miners,” McConnell said in a statement issued overnight. “This unrealistic plan, that the President would dump on his successor, would ensure higher utility rates and far fewer jobs."

All of this should come as no surprise. The midterms brought to fruition the 20-year efforts of the American oligarchs, led most visibly by the coal and oil billionaires Charles and David Koch, to “buy” Washington, and what they are buying are favourable conditions for maximising their profits.

Marcy Wheeler, author of The Anatomy of Deceit about the intelligence manipulations behind the Iraq war, wrote for Salon: “The GOP [the Grand Old Party, as Americans still tend to call the Republicans] had barely declared victory after its shellacking of Democrats on Tuesday before they started rolling out plans to melt the Earth.

“It was already clear that a Republican victory would doom efforts to do something about climate change. Moreover, the way the GOP won should have predicted that a victory would accelerate the burning of fossil fuel. After all, the oil magnate and climate change denying Koch brothers provided huge dark money backing for GOP candidates.”

But we should not think only of McConnell and the Koch brothers. It seems worthy of a Monty Python sketch that at a time when the world almost universally understands that ecosystems are under great stress from the effects of industrial pollution, and that the future can only be dark as a result, two major Senate committees will be chaired by men who routinely deny that there is any such thing as climate change.

Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma is slated to chair the Environment and Public Works Committee, and will be sympathetic to demands to “free” even America’s national parks for oil exploration. Ted Cruz of Texas is expected to get the Sub-committee on Science and Space: he believes that Darwinism is an atheist plot, and that since God created the world, only he can destroy it. Which Python would be best cast as which Senator?

According to The Hill, the Washington daily devoted to Congressional politics, the unravelling of the EPA smokestack pollution regulations and blocking of Obama’s attempts to meet international targets for carbon reductions are just the start of the new Republican agenda.

“Republican lawmakers are planning an all-out assault on Obama’s environmental agenda,” The Hill reported on Sunday, “including rules on mercury and other air toxics from power plants, limits on ground-level ozone that causes smog, mountaintop mining restrictions and the EPA’s attempt to redefine its jurisdiction over streams and ponds. The Interior Department is also in the crosshairs, with rules due to come soon on hydraulic fracturing on public land and protecting streams from mining waste.”

In Salon, Wheeler declared: “This Republican congressional majority will kill our planet.”

That might be attributing too much power to a gridlocked Washington and an America facing global decline. But the new Congress will certainly be marching out of step with all who conclude that climate change has put the world in peril, and should be tackled.