by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Reality is very important to me. So when I find myself surrounded by people who are denying a concrete reality that is all around us, it makes me very angry. What sparks me thinking about this is how it’s now very clear that the earth is heating up at an alarming rate.
And, yet, because how since about the 2000 presidential election, anything to do with global climate change is seen exclusively through the prism of partisan politics. Because of the broader problem of negative polarization, people on the Right are denying empirical evidence that global climate change is real. They do everything in their power to conflate, or mitigate or rationalize out of existence the very cold hard facts that we are now confronted with on a daily basis.
Even if you pin these people down, the pretty much just throw up their arms and say, something like, “humans have nothing to do with it” or “what do you want us to do about it.”
But, really, this is an issue of these people getting so wrapped up in the immediate political future that they’re willing to embrace nihilism. So, you can tick off all these different things that we should or could do to save ourselves, because of the absolute addictive power of negative polarization people on the Right will never, ever change their point of view on this subject. To the point that we could all be forced to move to Canada, Russia and Antarctica and these people would still be complaining about the Green New Deal banning cows because of their farts.
All of this points to not only how fucked we are, but there’s a severe problem in our political system that is putting the entire existence of humanity at risk. And the one thing that would fix this problem — leadership on the Right — is just not something that is going to happen anytime soon, maybe ever.
As it stands, people on the Right are looking at global climate change exclusively through the lens of partisan politics and economics. To the point where, like I said, they’re nihilistic. They would rather own the libs than risk, in any way, figuring out a way to save humanity through the group effort of a common front.
So, I don’t know what to tell you. Get ready to broil, I guess.
