Evidence of the damage caused by climate change accumulates with each day: catastrophic floods in Pakistan; fires in California and Australia; heat waves and droughts in Europe; and, of course, the deaths and destruction caused by Hurricane Ian. You would think that “conservatives” would see this and try to do something about it. But no!
Ross Douthat is a classic climate change agnostic; he doesn’t deny that it is occurring, but he just doesn’t think it’s a big problem, even after Hurricane Ian. In Sunday’s NYT column, he consequently resorts to straw man arguments to make his case. First, he notes the stupidity of the vandal who threw soup on a Van Gogh in order to make some kind of statement about climate change. Second, he notes that decarbonization is a process that will damage the interests of working people, the exact kind of people the left says it wants to protect. How about them apples!
As to the first example, tarring the climate change movement with the actions of one idiot is about as fair as calling Douthat a hypocrite on abortion because a few “pro-life” nuts shot and killed abortion providers. On the second point, the Democratic Party is well aware of the potential impacts to workers and has done its best to avoid them. As a result, the IRA contained only carrots, and the GND included elaborate proposals for wealth redistribution from wealthy people to workers. There is no incoherence here.
The bottom line is that Douthat is just like all of the other “pro-life” Republicans; he thinks hundreds of billions of dollars in damage, intense misery, and countless deaths caused by climate change are a small price to pay to keep America running on fossil fuels. My gutted house, in his eyes, is just acceptable collateral damage.