Just about every time a Hummer blows by me on the 880 or the 405, I’m left to ponder the yellow ribbon and the fading “Bush-Cheney” stickers adorning its billboard-sized backside. What is it about Republicans and the environment? I wonder. Is there some bylaw in the party platform that says you have to be an ecological flat-earther? I get the whole “private property is sacrosanct, don’t tread on me you dirty hippy tree-hugger” ethos. And after walking a gauntlet of Greenpeace canvassers on Telegraph Avenue, sometimes I catch myself indulging in it. But seriously, how did “The Party of Lincoln” become the party of Jim Inhofe?
On November 17th, Inhofe, Republican Senator from Oklahoma, told Fox News viewers not to worry about global warming. Why shouldn’t we worry? Because “God’s still up there,” he said. In July, he compared Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, to Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Inhofe is the outgoing chairman of the Senate Committee on, get this, the Environment and Public Works.
The first chapter of Genesis says mankind has “dominion” over the planet and everything in it. We’re not supposed to love it or nurture it. We’re supposed to “fill it and subdue it.” (Genesis 1:26-30) Inhofe and his Christian Coalition cohorts see the environmental movement as a secular attack on these biblical enjoinders. That could be why the Bush Administration muzzled its own top climate scientist at NASA, James Hansen, and why W himself started taking tea with famed warming skeptic Michael Crichton. A more cynical commenter than myself might point out the happy political synergy between right-wingers’ “faith-based” denial of global warming and the interests of their biggest campaign contributor, the oil industry. But I digress. The fact remains that the evangelical wing of the Republican Party cannot allow themselves to believe in an environmental crisis like global climate change, no matter how unified the scientific community becomes about it. Doing so would amount to heresy.
Christian hagiography is full of martyrs who suffered gruesome deaths rather than renounce their faith. Saint Stephen was stoned; Paul was beheaded; John the Evangelist was even cooked in boiling oil—all because they stood fast against unbelievers. Unfortunately, many right-wing Christians misapprehend their willful scientific ignorance for saintly righteousness. Just look at all the hubbub and silliness about evolution in recent years. Did you know there’s a theme park in Florida (where else would it be?) that “proves” dinosaurs and humans walked the earth together? But, again, I digress.
Let me return to my original question. What is it about being a Republican—not a Tim Lehay/Quiverfull/Christianist Republican, but simply a good-old-fashioned, cigar-chomping, upper-tax-bracket, capital gains–loving Republican—means you cannot call yourself a friend of the environment? After all, not all GOPers are born-again biblical literalists. And big-money honchos these days are just as likely to be vested in software apps as strip mining. So what gives?
Power. That’s what. As David Kuo documented in his recent book, the kingmakers of the Republican Party have pandered to evangelicals for years now, all the while deriding them behind their backs. When Richard Nixon and his advisor Kevin Phillips deployed the Southern strategy, they exploited racism for political gain. Now Karl Rove and his cronies have plunged the GOP into a game of environmental brinksmanship for the sake of winning elections. By elevating pols like Jim Inhofe to leadership positions and loading up the President’s speeches with Christianist code-speak, Republicans have secured a faithful voting block. But as global warming begins to wreak more and more havoc with our daily lives and other ecological Swords of Damocles begin to fall, this cynical right-wing power play could cost our country much more than even the disastrous Iraq war.
The one potential bright spot? I won’t have to watch SUV’s with jingoistic bumper stickers barrel past me on the 405 anymore. Even a Hummer can’t go very fast underwater.
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JB Powell lives in San Francisco. His novel, The Republic, is available from Livingston Press or at Amazon. Thumbnail by Ralph.