What’s this Texas Republican’s answer to the climate crisis? 'Turn the damn air conditioner up'

Whether you believe it is branded better as climate change or global warming, one thing is clear: Human-driven environmental disasters are a very real thing, and it is only going to get worse. The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a truly disastrous report at the beginning of August. In it scientists explain, irrefutably, how our planet's atmosphere is hotter now than it was before humans figured out how to burn everything up in the name of progress. It lays out the dire need for our civilization to move faster toward green energy, even as we have run out of time.

The Texas railroad commissioner's job includes overseeing oil and gas drilling and transportation in the Lone Star State, and Texas Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian has some ideas on how to solve this conundrum. According to Bloomberg, here's what Commissioner Christian told an audience at the NAPE Summit in Houston, an energy industry extravaganza: "Rather than $78 trillion dollars in spending, shutting down the industries around the world, keeping third-world countries from having coal-generated electric power and all kinds of things—turn the damn air conditioner up. It's that simple."

That's a real cynical and dark thing to come out of the mouth of a 70-year-old man. It isn't surprising, mind you, as Christian has been a climate denier for some time now. But what is arguably the most shocking aspect of this all is the fact that after years of denying the science of climate change and humankind's hand in accelerating the warming of the globe, he's in essence now just saying we are fucked, so why stop now since that would be hard and we couldn't make our money the way we make it now.

Christian is running for reelection this year, after a handful of extreme environmental events exposed how terrible and corrupt he and other conservative lawmakers have been for Texas. But getting your conservative bonafides in order has always been more important to Christians like Christian, which is why he has been vocal of late, lying about the financial risks of President Biden rejoining the Paris Climate Accord. In 2018, Christian argued that the only problems with fossil fuels was that millennials didn't understand the fossil fuel industry because they are all woke, which has led to "the acceptance of the politically-correct-driven environmental anti-oil and gas science."

Republican Wayne Christian has been involved in Texas politics for a long time. He started out as a gospel singer in the 1970s and 1980s with The Singing Christians and then the Mercy River Boys. From there Mr. Christian moved into classic right-wing conservative Bible politics, which argue no one should have access to birth control and women shouldn't be allowed to do anything that a good Christian man—maybe even a man with the last name of "Christian"—doesn't sign off on first.

Bloomberg points out that air conditioning use around the world has "tripled" since 1990.