By Steve Hynd
The Republican Party has presided over a decade of ignoring the largest single threat to America's national security - climate change. They continue to put their own fear of "the other" before a clear and present danger to the American public. Via Think Progress and our own tireless Kat:
In a nearly party-line vote of 242 to 180 on Thursday, the House adopted an amendment by Rep. John Carter (R-TX) to prohibit the Department of Homeland Security from participating in the Obama administration�s Interagency Task Force on Climate Change Adaptation.
The DHS's role in that Task Force is disaster planning: constituent agencies like FEMA and the Coast Guard are involved in flood management, safeguarding fresh water resources, and disaster response. FEMA logs 38 Federal climate-related disasters already this year (before hurricane season even starts) and 81 last year (the most since at least 1953). There are also federal responses to seven climate related emergency declarations and 57 Fire management Assistance declarations, most caused by the South-West's continuing severe drought.
According to Rep. Carter, the DHS' priority should be securing the southern border with Mexico instead. A place that is safer for police than working in a big city from which workers both legal and illegal come to fuel the U.S. economy. Even texas, Rep. Carter's own state, gains more in taxation alone from illegal immigration than it spends on services for those immigrants. Some threat.
TP:Climate notes:
The Republican Party is doing its utmost to cripple our nation�s ability to prepare for and respond to climate disasters. At Majority Leader Eric Cantor�s behest, House GOP slashed clean energy investments to pay for emergency disaster relief following the Joplin and Tuscaloosa tornadoes. They cut the DHS disaster preparedness budget, including firefighter funding, in half (after Democrats raised an outcry, some firefighter grants were restored). They have blocked funding for the NOAA Climate Service, and slashed money for critical weather satellites. In states throughout the nation, conservatives are gutting clean-energy programs and attacking climate science, while local emergency services budgets are stripped to the bone.
With the security of our homeland under the clear and present threat of global warming, conservatives are choosing to cripple our defenses, simply to serve the obscene profits of climate polluters.
Climate change is the big anvil-to-be around the GOP's neck. In decades to come, their denialism for so many years will wreck their claims to be the strong party on national security, as it becomes clearer that their intransigence (and being in hock to the energy lobby) for a decade in power left the US lagging behind others in facing up to the security challenges climate change entails.
Being irrational, of course, there is another way of looking at the mad GOP. They have secretly accepted that global warming is a reality and given we are at 395 ppm of CO2, or so, in the atmosphere, with no real prospect of curtailing further disastrous increases, human existence on the planet is going to become precarious. Mexico will be hit hard by the heat and droughts expected & what does Gwynne Dyer remind us about our past history: people raid or move before they starve. Thus from an elitist upper class GOP perspective securing the USAs southern border is just a pragmatic global warming adaptive measure. But the measure must be disguised, within a fake concern about domestic Mexican drug violence spilling over the Rio Grande etc., to protect the sensibilities of the strange folk that vote GOP or believe in angels and other childish things.
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