The Canary

 Every day, we are treated to stories about a (smallish) group of Americans who not only won't wear masks, but actively make it hard and whine about people who do. As with so many iterations of Cleek's Law ("Modern Conservatism believes the opposite of whatever Liberals believe, updated every 15 minutes."), this one is in overdrive. "Conservatives" are not only advocating for choice over themselves, but choices that imperil people around them. Not getting the eventual vaccine is bad, but not wearing a mask is fucking criminal.

Which brings us to a problem bigger than Covid: climate change. As Jon Chait notes, the Republican party is arguing the following position: 

- Climate change is probably real.
- It may even be manmade.
- We aren't going to do anything about it.

Chait's right; this is pathological. 

Republicans are harboring hope for some sort of Hail Mary technology that will simultaneously avoid the worst effects of global warming while still making Exxon profits. Let's say someone came up with a cheap and efficient way to create pure hydrogen from water. Hydrogen could be used both to store solar and wind power in fuel cells and replace certain aspects of fossil fuels, including high temperature industrial practices and potentially vehicle fuel. Sounds great, right? 

A fair read of the Republican position is that this would be bad. From the original piece in the Washington Examiner:

Republicans remain opposed to any policies that would reduce fossil fuel use, a stance they feel was rewarded by the results of House races in oil and gas districts in which incumbent Democrats lost after struggling to disassociate from Biden’s plans to transition to clean energy.

“If you think you can kill the oil and gas industry, that will have political consequences,” Reed said.

This is lunacy. 

Energy is a critical aspect of any economy. I remain convinced that the majority of the economic problems of the 1970s have energy prices as their root cause. Cheap, clean energy should be the holy grail of continued economic development. Renewables are now CHEAPER than most fossil fuels, especially coal. The problem with solar and wind is that they have a great deal of up-front costs, but then are largely dirt cheap. For an economy that looks beyond the next fiscal quarter's earning report, installing a shitload of solar and wind is a no-brainer, especially with interest rates at effectively zero.

What this means is that we should have a government that is helping to ease the costs of solar and wind installation, but one of the major parties - alone among all the mainstream political parties in the developed world - is basically saying they won't support these efforts, if it has the effect of reducing the burning of fossil fuels.

The behavior of "conservatives" to Covid is a shocking precursor to climate change, as the effects get worse and worse. As they are confronted with ecosystem collapse and impossible living conditions in parts of the country, as cities bake and forests burn, they will shout and whine about whatever the climate equivalent of wearing a damned mask is.

Again, it is hard to distance these positions from the unique form of American Evangelical Christianity, and it's rigid, unchallengeable faith system. American Jesus can never be wrong, and American Jesus happens to believe whatever I believe, including the fact that I don't have to wear a mask or stop burning coal.

We are deeply, deeply screwed.