The Taliban Climate Plan Is Better Than Republican “Drill, Baby, Drill” Nonsense – CleanTechnica

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The official Republican platform makes no mention of climate change. Not one word. Instead, it contains this statement:

“Common Sense tells us clearly that we must unleash American Energy if we want to destroy Inflation and rapidly bring down prices, build the Greatest Economy in History, revive our Defense Industrial Base, fuel Emerging Industries, and establish the United States as the Manufacturing Superpower of the World. We will DRILL, BABY, DRILL and we will become Energy Independent, and even Dominant again. The United States has more liquid gold under our feet than any other Nation, and it’s not even close. The Republican Party will harness that potential to power our future.”

Bill McKibben has an interesting reaction to the GOP platform. He says, “If climate change is mentioned in Milwaukee at all this week, it will be only to scorn the whole idea. As the former president said at a recent Virginia rally, ‘Global warming is fine. In fact, I heard it was going to be very warm today. It’s fine.’ So button it, all you scientists and other wackos. ‘The ocean will rise, maybe, and it may go down, also,’ Trump added. ‘But it may rise one eighth of an inch in the next 497 years, they say, one eighth, which gives you a little bit more waterfront property if you’re lucky enough to own.’”

The Taliban & Climate Change

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, “Afghanistan remains one of the world’s most vulnerable countries to the effects of climate change. According to the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Index, Afghanistan is the sixth most vulnerable country and least ready to address the impacts of climate change globally and currently ranked 8/10 on the INFORM Climate Change Risk Index. Between 1951 and 2010, Afghanistan’s mean annual temperature increased by some 1.8°C – nearly twice the global average. According to climate change models, future increases in mean annual temperature in Afghanistan are expected to be considerably higher than the global average, resulting in increased risk of drought and annual droughts in many parts of the country likely becoming the norm by 2030.”

The Washington Post reported recently that at a conference earlier this year, Lutfullah Khairkhwa, the Taliban’s deputy higher education minister, said, “Just like they invaded our country, they’ve invaded our climate. We must defend our climate, our water, our soil to the same extent we defend ourselves against invasions.”

While Taliban beliefs are rooted in centuries-old Pashtun culture and an extreme interpretation of Islam, the government affirms that climate change is real, that it’s destroying God’s work, and that those in the world who reject the truth of climate change need to get on board. The Taliban has asked imams in its tens of thousands of mosques to emphasize during Friday prayers the need for environmental protection. “Carbon footprints will weigh heavily on judgment day,” said Kabul-based imam Farisullah Azhari. “God will ask: How did you make your money? And then he will ask: How much suffering did you cause in the process?”

The Democratic Platform Emphasizes Climate Change

Compared to the Republican agenda, the Democratic platform is sober and responsible, Bill McKibben says.

“Going forward, Democrats will keep working to incentivize investment in transmission upgrades and new lines, and in the grid component manufacturing that’s needed to support that growth. We will improve and speed up the processes of environmental review and clean-energy permitting; and further scale up development of clean energy on public lands,” it says.

“Democrats will scale up solar, wind, and geothermal projects made possible by the Inflation Reduction Act and invest in clean energy R&D to build America’s legacy as a nation of new frontiers and possibilities. President Biden will expand the clean energy workforce, with a goal of tripling the size of the American Climate Corps by the end of this decade and making sure the clean energy and manufacturing jobs of tomorrow are open and accessible to communities that have been too often left out in the past. We’ll also eliminate tens of billions of dollars in unfair oil and gas subsidies and hold oil and gas executives accountable for potential collusion or price gouging. We will continue to implement the president’s Executive Order on Environmental Justice for all.”

This is straightforward and reasonable, McKibben adds.

“Biden has also cleared the ground for a transition to renewable energy. The IRA has moved us toward that goal faster than most thought possible. Given four more years the momentum will be irreversible — which is precisely why the fossil fuel industry is piling in behind Trump. They know that this is their last chance to slow the solar and wind train, and buy themselves an extra decade or two of high-profit relevance. As Texas A&M professor Andrew Dessler told the New York Times recently, “Their No. 1 agenda is to continue producing fossil fuels. Once you understand their main goal is to entrench fossil fuels regardless of anything else, everything makes sense.”

Understanding The Pernicious Power Of The Fossil Fuel Industry

Dessler doesn’t mince his words.

“Fossil fuel interests — including think tanks, trade associations and dark money groups — are often preventing the market from shifting to the lowest cost energy. Similar to other industries from tobacco to banking to pharmaceuticals, oil and gas interests use tactics like lobbying and manufacturing ‘grass-roots’ support to maximize profits.

“But as renewables have become a more formidable competitor, we are now seeing something different — a large scale effort to deceive the public into thinking that the alternative products are harmful, unreliable and worse for consumers. As renewables continue to drop in cost, it will become even more critical for policymakers and others to challenge these attempts to slow the adoption of cheaper and healthier forms of energy.

“One technique the industry and its allies have used is to spread falsehoods — for example, that offshore wind turbines kill whales or that renewable energy is prohibitively expensive — to stop projects from getting built. What appear to be ordinary concerned citizens or groups making good faith arguments about renewable energy are actually a well funded effort to disseminate a lie. Researchers at Brown University have revealed a complex web of fossil fuel interests, climate denial think tanks, and community groups that are behind opposition to wind farms off New Jersey, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Fossil fuel interests also donate piles of money to sympathetic politicians who then make false claims about renewable energy and push oil and gas on their constituents even when renewable energy is cheaper.”

Fossil fuels do deserve credit for getting us to where America is today — rich beyond the dreams of anyone living before the Industrial Revolution, Dessler says.

“But oil and gas are not the fuels of the future; they are changing the climate and generating air pollution that kills millions of people each year. They also bolster autocratic petrostates, fuel conflicts over energy resources, and contribute to geopolitical instability. Simply put, the industry’s lies can cost consumers their health, their money and their security.

“With existing technologies, the United States can largely phase out oil, gas and coal. The last 5 percent to 10 percent of that process may be expensive, but credible estimates place the cost of getting to net-zero emissions within the historical range of energy costs. This means that a sustainable future hinges on politics, not technology or science. Policymakers must now call out the fact that an industry facing obsolescence is distorting the market to try to shut out a superior competitor — clean energy. Make no mistake. Failure to do so may mean a planet no longer able to sustain human life in the style to which we have become accustomed.”

The Takeaway

The upcoming US election is important not because of gender identity issues or building walls around America, but because it is an opportunity for the US to continue moving forward with a climate agenda that is at least as robust as the one the Taliban is proposing. Can you imagine how we will explain to our children that the United States came to embrace a policy on global warming weaker than what the Taliban propose? What a sorry epitaph for a once great nation that would be.

All the other rhetoric and scary incantations at the Republican convention this week will only serve to highlight how divorced from reality the Republican party is today. The world is at a climate inflection point. One way will leave a glimmer of hope that the the climate emergency can be dealt with in a rational fashion. The other way will surely tip the world over into an irreversible downward spiral that will endanger most of human civilization. Please vote responsibly.