On Sunday, George Stephanopoulos, of ABC's This Week, interviewed Governor Jerry Brown on the more than 1,500 wildfires in California in 2014, during which Brown asserted that they were caused, in part by global warming, and that the challenge of reducing our fossil fuel burning will be more difficult because "virtually no Republican who accepts the science that virtually is unanimous."
PolitiFact decides to fact check Governor Browm's claim in "Virtually no Republican" in Washington accepts climate change science. and found it to be "Mostly True," which is not surprising. Is it not time to push this issue to the the next step and ask what are the implications for America's economy, labor force, culture, and national security if mainstream Republicans can not push back on what I believe is actually a minority of their base who really does not believe in science, stand up and stop this silliness before the damage is irreversible?
"That's a challenge," Brown said. "It is true that there's virtually no Republican who accepts the science that virtually is unanimous. I mean there is no scientific question. There's just political denial for various reasons, best known to those people who are in denial."
Noting that Republicans are less likely than Democrats and independents to believe humans cause global warming, and tea party are the least likely of all groups to accept science PolitiFact was only able to find 8 our of 278 Republican congressmen who will admit to believingg in the science of climate change.
Rep. Michael Grimm, (R-N.Y.), Sen. Susan Collins, (R-MN), Sen. Lamar Alexander, (R-TN),Sen. Mark Kirk,( R-IL), Rep. Chris Smith, (R-N.J), Sen. Bob Corker, (R-TN), Sen. John Thune, (R-S.D.), Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, (R-N.J.)
South Carolina Rep. Bob Inglis believe his loss to tea party challenger Trey Gowdy. Inglis was at least partially due to his belief in climate science.
The Secret Confessions
Although they have lost several primaries, the tea party has been successful in polarizing American politics and pulling the political spectrum to the right by intimidating many moderate Republican from being willing to even admit in public that they believe in science! Many will not even discuss related issues like global warming in public.
"Most Republicans say the same thing behind closed doors: ‘Of course, I get that the climate is changing, of course I get that we need to do something — but I need to get reelected,’ " Audubon Society President David Yarnold told National Journal in 2013. "Somehow they’re going to have to find a safe place on this.
My guess is that the problem isn't really that a majority of Republicans do not believe in science and climate change, the problem is that they are afraid admit it in public. It is not even a majority of Republicans I believe, but rather a minority. It may be that they are the loudest and best funded faction because a variety of groups representing the interests of the fossil fuel industry like the Koch brothers find it exceptionally convenient to have a highly charged up group of ideologically committed "shock troops" ready to charge forth on the same political agenda, but I believe the number of "true believers" may not be as large as it appears.
(If it were not for certain ethical concerns, and risk of imprisonment an interesting experiment would be to capture random samples of them and force them to take lie-detector-like tests like the Voight-Kamff psycho-metric test in Blade Runner to see what they really believe - a bonus is we could check to see of they were replicants, or aliens at the same time - something I've sometimes suspected.)
Many decades ago, Republicans made a Faustian bargain with the devil which was amplified by Karl Rove, by forging a grand coalition between foreign policy conservatives, fiscal conservatives, and the more problematic "social value" conservatives."
Among this later group are the fundamentalist faction of evangelistic Christians for whom the anti-science position became a tactic to undermine what they perceived as liberal and secular humanist attacks on their faith and for some, perhaps even a minority, who wanted to defend a literal interpretation of the Bible. For some others this was a fair trade for support for persecuting homosexuals, the women's liberation movement, receiving support from anti-abortionists, and even racists could join in - rounding out the "social values conservatives."
Although, in some cases some overlap exists with the second group of anti-tax, pro-corporate economic and fiscal conservatives a the third group of foreign policy and and pro-military conservatives sufficient differences in priority in these groups exists that I believe there may be hope that national security and national economic vitality arguments are so powerful and valid we may have hope that the Republican Party will come to its senses, and reject this virulent anti-science cancer that threatens to damage our nation and world.
While tea party activists may laugh and celebrate their successful intimidation of moderate Republicans into denying science and climate change, I ask that we all pause for a moment and consider for a moment some tragic unintended side effects of propagating an anti-science and anti-education ethos in our country while most other countries are doing the opposite.
A Side Effect of Science-Denial Will Be Damage To Our Economy and National Security
For example, as China tries to evolve into a more technologically advanced service economy, China has produced a record 7 million university graduates this year, 7 times the number of 15 years ago. This is in a culture that has already revered scholars since the days of Confucius.
While other nations with superior scientists, and stronger economies will be finding ways to adapt and change will we end up being a struggling in ways we are not accustomed to as a second or third rate nation with a backward work force? What will prevent this if substantial fractions of our population despise education and science and some states do not even allow schools to buy textbooks that mention evolution?
I've spoken with leaders of high technology based multinational firms who say one issue that causes them to hesitate to invest here is that in some places our workers are not able to read and understand instruction manuals for advanced manufacturing technologies which are based the latest scientific conceptsm as well as workers in other countries. Scholars at Tai Da University told me last time I was in the Republic of China that the average Asian High School student scores higher on international math tests than the average American college graduate.
Innovation, entrepreneurs, and new businesses will increasingly come from other countries where science, education, and intelligence are admired, respected, nurtured, and promoted.
So here's a national security threat for you. "Republican science denial - the clear and present danger to our national security."
Mainstream Republicans Should Take a Stand and Repudiate Science Denialism
Last week, Bill Briggs of NBC News reported a group of 16 retired three and four star generals and admirals echoed the findings of the IPCC that global warming and climate are here now, but they add the additional warning that global warming represents a national security to the U.S. as well as to the security and stability of other nations of the world.
Please follow the link here, or check my archives from about a week ago for my synopsis. Four-Star Warning: Generals Dub Climate Change a Security Risk, and calling it “a catalyst for conflict” for the "increasingly decentralized power structures around the world."
The greater threats to U.S. national security come not just from a destabilized world as greater fractions of the world population starve, and their homelands become uninhabitable due to flooding or drought. Think also of how the United States military spending keeps up as our nation's economy falters. As our economy becomes a relatively smaller fraction of the global economy will we try to spend a higher fraction of our total GDP to maintain defense spending ratios compared to the rest of the world?
"Fortunately" (snark) since our current defense spending is greater than about the next 45 countries combined, we have some margin to slide, but at some point our advantage will dwindle. But, even just merely maintaining a superior ratio of military spending may not be sufficient to maintain military superiority, it may become a matter of technological advantage as well.. We will not remain a strong world power with a strong anti-science bias, even if it is "just" a deliberate political strategy to paralyze our political system that many not really believe.
Eventually, increasing our the fraction of our GDP devoted to military spending potentially becoming a vicious cycle as we try to spend higher fractions to keep up with countries with larger economies such as China which will surpass us soon will be a losing proposition. This was one of our core strategies for breaking the former U.S.S.R. who we had bullied and intimidated into spending over 20% of their GDP on military spending just before their collapse which "crowded out" capital investment and consumer spending leading to the "death spiral."
Most military, foreign policy, fiscal, and economic Republicans conservatives understand this and I believe nearly all Republicans love America just as much as Democrats do. I ask that after they think about this they explain this to the social value conservatives and finally do the 2012 Mitt Romney postmortem that never really happened and reject this virulent science denialism once and for all.