Why we can't afford another Republican President

[boatsnguitars]

This article in the NY Times that highlights each Republican Presidential Candidate's position on Climate is horrifying if any but Francis Suarez makes it into the Oval Office:

Donald J. Trump
As president, Donald J. Trump mocked climate science and championed the production of the fossil fuels chiefly responsible for warming the planet.
He rolled back more than 100 environmental regulations, mostly aimed at reducing planet-warming emissions and protecting clean air and water; appointed cabinet members who were openly dismissive of the threat of climate change, including Scott Pruitt as head of the Environmental Protection Agency; and withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement, under which almost every country had committed to try to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.
President Biden rejoined the Paris Agreement and undid many of Mr. Trump’s policies, but the damage may not be fully reversible. A report last year from researchers at Yale and Columbia found that the United States’ environmental performance had plummeted in relation to other countries as a result of the Trump administration’s actions.
Mr. Trump has given no indication that his approach would be different in a second term. He has repeatedly minimized the severity of climate change, including claiming falsely that sea levels are projected to rise only ⅛ of an inch over 200 to 300 years. But according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, sea levels are rising by that amount every year.

Ron DeSantis
Gov. Ron DeSantis leads a state, Florida, that is on the front lines of climate change: It has been hit hard by hurricanes, which are becoming more frequent and more severe as the Atlantic Ocean gets warmer.
But Mr. DeSantis has dismissed concern about climate change as a pretext for “left-wing stuff” and said on Fox News last month, “I’ve always rejected the politicization of the weather.”
He has, however, taken significant steps to fortify the state against stronger storms and rising waters. Among other things, he appointed the state’s first “chief resilience officer” and backed the Resilient Florida Program, which has sent hundreds of millions of dollars to vulnerable communities to fund projects like building sea walls and improving drainage systems.
Scientists support these sorts of adaptation efforts, because the climate has already changed enough that even aggressive emission reductions will not avert all the effects. But they are also clear that such measures are not enough on their own.

Nikki Haley
Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina, has acknowledged that climate change is real and caused by humans, but she has generally rejected governmental efforts to reduce emissions. Her advocacy group Stand for America said that “liberal ideas would cost trillions and destroy our economy.”
As ambassador to the United Nations during the Trump administration, Ms. Haley was closely involved in withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement. At the time, she said, “Just because we pulled out of the Paris accord doesn’t mean we don’t believe in climate protection.” Over the next three years, the Trump administration systematically reversed climate protections.
But Ms. Haley has supported greater use of carbon capture technology to remove carbon from the air. She and some other Republicans — including another presidential candidate, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota — have presented this as a way to limit climate change while continuing to use fossil fuels. Many experts agree that carbon capture could be a powerful tool, but it is unlikely to be sufficient on its own, in part because of its high cost.

Mike Pence
Mr. Pence has acknowledged that climate change is real. He said during the 2016 campaign, “There’s no question that the activities that take place in this country and in countries around the world have some impact on the environment and some impact on climate.”
But that assertion falls short of the scientific consensus that human activity is the primary driver of climate change. He has also downplayed the severity, like in his comments this week that “radical environmentalists” were exaggerating climate change’s effects. And as vice president, Mr. Pence had a hand in Mr. Trump’s defiantly anti-climate agenda, including defending the decision to withdraw from the Paris accord by saying Mr. Trump had stood up for “America first.”
Mr. Pence’s political organization, Advancing American Freedom, has denounced “the left’s climate radicalism” and called for a rejection of “climate mandates.” It has also called for expediting oil and gas leases and taking other steps to “unleash the full potential” of fossil fuel production in the United States.

Tim Scott
Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina has also acknowledged that climate change is occurring, once telling The Post and Courier, his home-state newspaper: “There is no doubt that man is having an impact on our environment. There is no doubt about that. I am not living under a rock.”
At the same time, he has opposed most policies that would curb carbon dioxide emissions. During the Obama administration, Mr. Scott challenged a regulation that would have required utilities to move away from coal and adopt wind, solar and other renewable power. During the Trump administration, he argued for dumping the Paris Agreement. And last year, he voted against President Biden’s expansive climate and health legislation that will invest about $370 billion in spending and tax credits over 10 years into clean energy technologies

Chris Christie
Chris Christie acknowledged the reality of climate change before many of his fellow Republicans did. “When you have over 90 percent of the world’s scientists who have studied this stating that climate change is occurring and that humans play a contributing role, it’s time to defer to the experts,” he said in 2011.
As governor of New Jersey, he announced a moratorium on new coal-plant permits, filed a successful petition with the E.P.A. to demand reduced pollution from a coal plant along the Pennsylvania border and signed offshore wind power legislation. But state regulators in his administration didn’t approve any wind projects — and at the same time, Mr. Christie withdrew New Jersey from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a multistate cap-and-trade partnership, and vetoed state legislators’ efforts to rejoin it.
He also said in 2015 that climate change, while real, was “not a crisis.” Last year, he called for increases to domestic oil production.

Asa Hutchinson
Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, has not spoken much about climate change. But when he has, he has generally stuck to the Republican Party line, rejecting government efforts to reduce emissions.
He criticized President Barack Obama’s power plant regulations and, in 2019, praised the Trump administration for its environmental deregulation. Shortly after Mr. Biden was elected president in 2020, Mr. Hutchinson joined several other Republican governors in pledging to sue if the federal government mandated emission reductions.
“Our power companies have voluntarily embraced sources of alternative energy without heavy-handed regulation from government,” he said at the time.

Vivek Ramaswamy
Vivek Ramaswamy began his presidential campaign by claiming that “faith, patriotism and hard work” had been replaced by “secular religions like Covidism, climatism and gender ideology.” In an interview with The New York Times, he defined “climatism” as “prioritizing the goal of containing climate change at all costs.”
He is also an outspoken opponent of environmental, social and governance investing, or E.S.G., in which financial companies consider the long-term societal effects — including climate-related effects — of their investment decisions.
Mr. Ramaswamy supports using more nuclear power and has painted a conspiracy theory for why many environmentalists oppose it. “The problem with nuclear energy is it’s too good,” he claimed on Twitter this April. “And if you solve the ‘clean energy problem’ activists lose their favorite Trojan Horse for advancing ‘global equity’ by penalizing the West.”
But many environmental activists cite concerns about the safe storage of nuclear materials and the potential for accidents as the reason for their opposition — though they are by no means united in their stance, and many support nuclear power as a carbon-free source of energy.

Doug Burgum
Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota has pushed harder to address climate change than most Republicans by actively identifying carbon neutrality as a goal: In 2021, he announced that he wanted North Dakota to reach it by 2030.
He wants to do so through carbon-capture programs alone, without transitioning away from fossil fuels. (Climate scientists are skeptical that this is possible, even as they agree the technology holds promise.)
Mr. Burgum, who created a tax incentive for one form of carbon capture, argued in an interview with Future Farmer magazine in 2021 that his policies showed “North Dakota can reach the end goal faster with innovation and free markets and without the heavy hand of government mandates and regulation.”

Francis Suarez
Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami has acknowledged that climate change is a serious threat — one that is already hurting his city, he wrote in 2019 in a New York Times opinion essay with the former United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon.
Mr. Suarez has largely focused on adaptation measures such as building sea walls. But unlike most Republicans, he has also endorsed significant emission reductions. In 2020, he announced a goal for Miami to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. The Miami City Commission approved a plan with his support to reach that goal, including by making 40 percent of passenger vehicles electric by 2035 and moving the city’s electricity supply entirely to renewable sources by the same year.


This is what happens when a Party completely abandons Science-based decision-making in favor of pandering to Religion. This has been decades in the making, and now the Frankenstein Monster they've created (their ignorant, hate-mongering voter base) would rather burn the Earth than admit they were wrong.

The solution is easy: vote Democrat and hope the shift to the Left allows them to put meaningful Green policies into law. Otherwise, we are only at the very tip of a quickly melting iceberg of Environmental disaster.

[LittleNipper]

Honestly, what do you really believe the government can do with regard to climate change? Abuse is the only thing we have control over. Children and old people being assaulted. A throw away attitude of anything from babies to buildings and automobiles to education. There's the obsession that money will fix anything, along with a pervasive opinion that a good character has no valve ---- whatever a person does on their own time is unimportant. I don't hate Democrats, I simply find that lately they are more interested in acquiring votes anyway possible but will stand up for nothing that is encouraging and long lasting.

[marke]

This article in the NY Times that highlights each Republican Presidential Candidate's position on Climate is horrifying if any but Francis Suarez makes it into the Oval Office:

Donald J. Trump
As president, Donald J. Trump mocked climate science and championed the production of the fossil fuels chiefly responsible for warming the planet.
He rolled back more than 100 environmental regulations, mostly aimed at reducing planet-warming emissions and protecting clean air and water; appointed cabinet members who were openly dismissive of the threat of climate change, including Scott Pruitt as head of the Environmental Protection Agency; and withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement, under which almost every country had committed to try to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.
President Biden rejoined the Paris Agreement and undid many of Mr. Trump’s policies, but the damage may not be fully reversible. A report last year from researchers at Yale and Columbia found that the United States’ environmental performance had plummeted in relation to other countries as a result of the Trump administration’s actions.
Mr. Trump has given no indication that his approach would be different in a second term. He has repeatedly minimized the severity of climate change, including claiming falsely that sea levels are projected to rise only ⅛ of an inch over 200 to 300 years. But according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, sea levels are rising by that amount every year.

Ron DeSantis
Gov. Ron DeSantis leads a state, Florida, that is on the front lines of climate change: It has been hit hard by hurricanes, which are becoming more frequent and more severe as the Atlantic Ocean gets warmer.
But Mr. DeSantis has dismissed concern about climate change as a pretext for “left-wing stuff” and said on Fox News last month, “I’ve always rejected the politicization of the weather.”
He has, however, taken significant steps to fortify the state against stronger storms and rising waters. Among other things, he appointed the state’s first “chief resilience officer” and backed the Resilient Florida Program, which has sent hundreds of millions of dollars to vulnerable communities to fund projects like building sea walls and improving drainage systems.
Scientists support these sorts of adaptation efforts, because the climate has already changed enough that even aggressive emission reductions will not avert all the effects. But they are also clear that such measures are not enough on their own.

Nikki Haley
Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina, has acknowledged that climate change is real and caused by humans, but she has generally rejected governmental efforts to reduce emissions. Her advocacy group Stand for America said that “liberal ideas would cost trillions and destroy our economy.”
As ambassador to the United Nations during the Trump administration, Ms. Haley was closely involved in withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement. At the time, she said, “Just because we pulled out of the Paris accord doesn’t mean we don’t believe in climate protection.” Over the next three years, the Trump administration systematically reversed climate protections.
But Ms. Haley has supported greater use of carbon capture technology to remove carbon from the air. She and some other Republicans — including another presidential candidate, Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota — have presented this as a way to limit climate change while continuing to use fossil fuels. Many experts agree that carbon capture could be a powerful tool, but it is unlikely to be sufficient on its own, in part because of its high cost.

Mike Pence
Mr. Pence has acknowledged that climate change is real. He said during the 2016 campaign, “There’s no question that the activities that take place in this country and in countries around the world have some impact on the environment and some impact on climate.”
But that assertion falls short of the scientific consensus that human activity is the primary driver of climate change. He has also downplayed the severity, like in his comments this week that “radical environmentalists” were exaggerating climate change’s effects. And as vice president, Mr. Pence had a hand in Mr. Trump’s defiantly anti-climate agenda, including defending the decision to withdraw from the Paris accord by saying Mr. Trump had stood up for “America first.”
Mr. Pence’s political organization, Advancing American Freedom, has denounced “the left’s climate radicalism” and called for a rejection of “climate mandates.” It has also called for expediting oil and gas leases and taking other steps to “unleash the full potential” of fossil fuel production in the United States.

Tim Scott
Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina has also acknowledged that climate change is occurring, once telling The Post and Courier, his home-state newspaper: “There is no doubt that man is having an impact on our environment. There is no doubt about that. I am not living under a rock.”
At the same time, he has opposed most policies that would curb carbon dioxide emissions. During the Obama administration, Mr. Scott challenged a regulation that would have required utilities to move away from coal and adopt wind, solar and other renewable power. During the Trump administration, he argued for dumping the Paris Agreement. And last year, he voted against President Biden’s expansive climate and health legislation that will invest about $370 billion in spending and tax credits over 10 years into clean energy technologies

Chris Christie
Chris Christie acknowledged the reality of climate change before many of his fellow Republicans did. “When you have over 90 percent of the world’s scientists who have studied this stating that climate change is occurring and that humans play a contributing role, it’s time to defer to the experts,” he said in 2011.
As governor of New Jersey, he announced a moratorium on new coal-plant permits, filed a successful petition with the E.P.A. to demand reduced pollution from a coal plant along the Pennsylvania border and signed offshore wind power legislation. But state regulators in his administration didn’t approve any wind projects — and at the same time, Mr. Christie withdrew New Jersey from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a multistate cap-and-trade partnership, and vetoed state legislators’ efforts to rejoin it.
He also said in 2015 that climate change, while real, was “not a crisis.” Last year, he called for increases to domestic oil production.

Asa Hutchinson
Asa Hutchinson, the former governor of Arkansas, has not spoken much about climate change. But when he has, he has generally stuck to the Republican Party line, rejecting government efforts to reduce emissions.
He criticized President Barack Obama’s power plant regulations and, in 2019, praised the Trump administration for its environmental deregulation. Shortly after Mr. Biden was elected president in 2020, Mr. Hutchinson joined several other Republican governors in pledging to sue if the federal government mandated emission reductions.
“Our power companies have voluntarily embraced sources of alternative energy without heavy-handed regulation from government,” he said at the time.

Vivek Ramaswamy
Vivek Ramaswamy began his presidential campaign by claiming that “faith, patriotism and hard work” had been replaced by “secular religions like Covidism, climatism and gender ideology.” In an interview with The New York Times, he defined “climatism” as “prioritizing the goal of containing climate change at all costs.”
He is also an outspoken opponent of environmental, social and governance investing, or E.S.G., in which financial companies consider the long-term societal effects — including climate-related effects — of their investment decisions.
Mr. Ramaswamy supports using more nuclear power and has painted a conspiracy theory for why many environmentalists oppose it. “The problem with nuclear energy is it’s too good,” he claimed on Twitter this April. “And if you solve the ‘clean energy problem’ activists lose their favorite Trojan Horse for advancing ‘global equity’ by penalizing the West.”
But many environmental activists cite concerns about the safe storage of nuclear materials and the potential for accidents as the reason for their opposition — though they are by no means united in their stance, and many support nuclear power as a carbon-free source of energy.

Doug Burgum
Gov. Doug Burgum of North Dakota has pushed harder to address climate change than most Republicans by actively identifying carbon neutrality as a goal: In 2021, he announced that he wanted North Dakota to reach it by 2030.
He wants to do so through carbon-capture programs alone, without transitioning away from fossil fuels. (Climate scientists are skeptical that this is possible, even as they agree the technology holds promise.)
Mr. Burgum, who created a tax incentive for one form of carbon capture, argued in an interview with Future Farmer magazine in 2021 that his policies showed “North Dakota can reach the end goal faster with innovation and free markets and without the heavy hand of government mandates and regulation.”

Francis Suarez
Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami has acknowledged that climate change is a serious threat — one that is already hurting his city, he wrote in 2019 in a New York Times opinion essay with the former United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon.
Mr. Suarez has largely focused on adaptation measures such as building sea walls. But unlike most Republicans, he has also endorsed significant emission reductions. In 2020, he announced a goal for Miami to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. The Miami City Commission approved a plan with his support to reach that goal, including by making 40 percent of passenger vehicles electric by 2035 and moving the city’s electricity supply entirely to renewable sources by the same year.


This is what happens when a Party completely abandons Science-based decision-making in favor of pandering to Religion. This has been decades in the making, and now the Frankenstein Monster they've created (their ignorant, hate-mongering voter base) would rather burn the Earth than admit they were wrong.

The solution is easy: vote Democrat and hope the shift to the Left allows them to put meaningful Green policies into law. Otherwise, we are only at the very tip of a quickly melting iceberg of Environmental disaster.

Climate change is a hoax being used by world Marxist leaders to bankrupt and corrupt entire nations to create the groundwork for their new Marxist atheist world order.

The U.N.'s Global Warming War On Capitalism: An Important History Lesson (forbes.com)
OPINION
The U.N.'s Global Warming War On Capitalism: An Important History Lesson

[placebofactor]

Honestly, what do you really believe the government can do with regard to climate change? Abuse is the only thing we have control over. Children and old people being assaulted. A throw away attitude of anything from babies to buildings and automobiles to education. There's the obsession that money will fix anything, along with a pervasive opinion that a good character has no valve ---- whatever a person does on their own time is unimportant. I don't hate Democrats, I simply find that lately they are more interested in acquiring votes anyway possible but will stand up for nothing that is encouraging and long lasting.

Let's talk about what REALLY causes pollution, and there isn't a dam thing anyone can do about it.

Two years ago, the forest in Canada burned for months, polluting half a dozen northeastern states. This past year, the forest in California and Colorado burned for a month, polluting the Western part of the nation. There are more than 30 active volcanoes spewing millions of tons of ash into the upper atmosphere right now. Science recently wrote the oceans have been warming because of underwater volcanic activity.

Consider wars. Emissions from rockets, tanks, trucks, cannons, and thousands of Bombs that explode daily, causing massive fires in the cities, towns, and forests.

Let's consider air travel. Tens of thousands of planes are flying around the world, polluting our atmosphere, DAILY.

Mt. Saint Helens exploded and through millions of tons of ash into the atmosphere, covering a great deal of the Northern states from Washington to New York.

When the volcano Krakatoa eruption in the 1800s, it sent six cubic miles of rock, ash, dust, and debris into the atmosphere, darkening the skies and producing vividly colored sunsets and other spectacular effects around the world.

Writing from England, poet Gerard Manley Hopkins described skies of green, blue, gold and purple, “… more like inflamed flesh than the lucid reds of ordinary sunsets … the glow is intense; that is what strikes everyone; it has prolonged the daylight, and optically changed the season; it bathes the whole sky, it is mistaken for the reflection of a great fire.”

Dense clouds immediately lowered temperatures in the immediate area. As the dust spread, according to later studies, the eruption likely caused a drop in average global temperatures for several years. There were crop failures around the world because of the darkened skies.

Other climatic changes occurred thousands of miles from Indonesia: The amount of rainfall in Los Angeles – 38.18 inches – in the months following the Krakatoa eruption remains the city’s highest annual rainfall on record.

Krakatoa is far from the most powerful volcanic eruption in history (the eruption of nearby Tambora in 1815, for example, measured a 7 on the VEI), it’s arguably the most famous. Its 1883 eruption became the first truly global catastrophe.

Here's the problem with the Democrats, and it's not global warming. It appears they're still going through a conflict of generations! Their real problem, their still having spasms over crooked Hillary's and Kamala's losses to Donald Trump.

[Difflugia]

Honestly, what do you really believe the government can do with regard to climate change? Abuse is the only thing we have control over.

So, the Republican solution to the climate crisis is to change the subject? Sounds about par for the course.

[placebofactor]

Honestly, what do you really believe the government can do with regard to climate change? Abuse is the only thing we have control over.

So, the Republican solution to the climate crisis is to change the subject? Sounds about par for the course.

And the Democratic solution is to ignore reality. The reality is that wildfires, volcanic eruptions on land, and eruptions below the surface of the oceans that are heating the oceans up are the major causes of climate change, nature a big contributor. As for other nations like China, Japan, and India, go preach to them about climate change, they're making the mess. Go look at their industrial cities, can't see your hand in front of your face. Then go talk to Russia about their prolonged war and the burning down of Ukrainian cities and forests, and the gas-guzzling military vehicles that get 4 miles to a gallon and then go through the fields and farmlands, tearing up the landscape. Then go talk to the Iranians who supply rockets to every terror group in the Middle East, thousands fired into the Red Sea at cargo ships, and toward Israel.

Why do you people always put the blame and the burden on America? One more thing, what are you willing to give up in order to stop climate change? Would you give up driving your car or SUV, or flying if you fly? My answer, "probably not." Democrats want others to give up things, and what about you? What's your sacrifice going to be?

[Difflugia]

And the Democratic solution is to ignore reality. The reality is that wildfires, volcanic eruptions on land, and eruptions below the surface of the oceans that are heating the oceans up are the major causes of climate change, nature a big contributor.

"Despite controversy, the scientific consensus is that human activities are the primary cause of contemporary climate change, which is already affecting the environment, human health, and the economy." (Source)

Democrats are listening to the scientists, who disagree with you and the talking heads you trust. If trusting the scientific consensus means "ignoring reality," you'll have to do something more to support that.

As for other nations like China, Japan, and India, go preach to them about climate change, they're making the mess.

The United States is the second-largest emitter of CO₂ in the world and the largest per capita. (Source) "Everybody else is doing it," isn't a valid excuse when we're number two, especially when the Chinese justify their pollution by pointing fingers at us. If your upstream neighbor poops in your river, that doesn't justify you pooping on the people downstream of you. At least it doesn't for the Democrats I know.

Why do you people always put the blame and the burden on America?

Because we can do math. Number two, remember?

One more thing, what are you willing to give up in order to stop climate change? Would you give up driving your car or SUV, or flying if you fly? My answer, "probably not." Democrats want others to give up things, and what about you? What's your sacrifice going to be?

What does this even mean? Democrats drive and fly more than Republicans? Democrats are the ones supporting the reduction of fossil fuel use in whatever guise. How does that turn into an expectation that others bear the brunt of the sacrifice? That's a textbook non sequitur and as an attempted tu quoque, it's not even true. Little Nipper's solution was to change the subject; yours is, "Look over there!"

[placebofactor]

And the Democratic solution is to ignore reality. The reality is that wildfires, volcanic eruptions on land, and eruptions below the surface of the oceans that are heating the oceans up are the major causes of climate change, nature a big contributor.

"Despite controversy, the scientific consensus is that human activities are the primary cause of contemporary climate change, which is already affecting the environment, human health, and the economy." (Source)

Democrats are listening to the scientists, who disagree with you and the talking heads you trust. If trusting the scientific consensus means "ignoring reality," you'll have to do something more to support that.

As for other nations like China, Japan, and India, go preach to them about climate change, they're making the mess.

The United States is the second-largest emitter of CO₂ in the world and the largest per capita. (Source) "Everybody else is doing it," isn't a valid excuse when we're number two, especially when the Chinese justify their pollution by pointing fingers at us. If your upstream neighbor poops in your river, that doesn't justify you pooping on the people downstream of you. At least it doesn't for the Democrats I know.

Why do you people always put the blame and the burden on America?

Because we can do math. Number two, remember?

One more thing, what are you willing to give up in order to stop climate change? Would you give up driving your car or SUV, or flying if you fly? My answer, "probably not." Democrats want others to give up things, and what about you? What's your sacrifice going to be?

What does this even mean? Democrats drive and fly more than Republicans? Democrats are the ones supporting the reduction of fossil fuel use in whatever guise. How does that turn into an expectation that others bear the brunt of the sacrifice? That's a textbook non sequitur and as an attempted tu quoque, it's not even true. Little Nipper's solution was to change the subject; yours is, "Look over there!"

If you haven't learned one thing, learn this: the whole charade about climate change is about MONEY$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.

[Difflugia]

If you haven't learned one thing, learn this: the whole charade about climate change is about MONEY$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.

So, were your other claims red herrings? Is this one? It's not really a response.

[placebofactor]

If you haven't learned one thing, learn this: the whole charade about climate change is about MONEY$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.

So, were your other claims red herrings? Is this one? It's not really a response.

No, my other claims are the facts; the money part is the greed that has overtaken the elite.