Marjorie Taylor Greene sums up the GOP's cognitive dissonance on climate change in a single tweet

29 June 2022

The consequences of anthropomorphic climate change, due to the carbon dioxide and methane waste produced by humanity's relentless burning of fossil fuels, are becoming more pronounced with each passing year. Record heat waves, extreme cold, prolonged droughts, powerful storms, torrential precipitation, crop failures, wildfires, melting ice caps, sea-level rise, and biodiversity loss are all symptoms of modern civilization's seemingly unbreakable addiction to oil. The data, according to the planet's scientists, is as irrefutable as the most successful scientific theories like the Standard Model of Particle Physics and Quantum Mechanics.

That conclusion is not limited to academia, however. Last year, the office of the Director of National Intelligence published a 27-page report outlining in no uncertain terms the risks that climate change poses to the security of the United States and beyond.

"We assess that climate change will increasingly exacerbate risks to US national security interests as the physical impacts increase and geopolitical tensions mount about how to respond to the challenge," the document's opening brief states.

The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) wrote in its 2022 assessment:

Climate change impacts and risks are becoming increasingly complex and more difficult to manage. Multiple climate hazards will occur simultaneously, and multiple climatic and non-climatic risks will interact, resulting in compounding overall risk and risks cascading across sectors and regions. Some responses to climate change result in new impacts and risks.

It is unequivocal that climate change has already disrupted human and natural systems. Past and current development trends (past emissions, development and climate change) have not advanced global climate resilient development (very high confidence). Societal choices and actions implemented in the next decade determine the extent to which medium- and long-term pathways will deliver higher or lower climate resilient development (high confidence). Importantly climate resilient development prospects are increasingly limited if current greenhouse gas emissions do not rapidly decline, especially if 1.5°C global warming is exceeded in the near term (high confidence). These prospects are constrained by past development, emissions and climate change, and enabled by inclusive governance, adequate and appropriate human and technological resources, information, capacities and finance (high confidence).

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden, who campaigned on a commitment to renewable energy, is receiving an enormous amount of flak for issuing permits for expanding exploration and drilling on public lands to mitigate historically high gas prices, which are linked to price gouging by oil producers. But, earlier this month, House Republicans – entrenched in their credo of blaming Biden for everything – unanimously voted against a measure that would have curbed corporate exploitation.

Additionally, the Supreme Court's right-wing majority is expected to issue a ruling on Thursday that would cripple the Environmental Protection Agency's legal authority to regulate and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from some of the nation's worst polluters.

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Despite the accelerating frequency and intensity of climate-driven emergencies, as well as the unanimous warnings that have been ringing from credible experts in their respective fields, the Republican Party at large continues to sow doubt that the problem exists. The GOP is currently the only major political organization in the industrialized world that refuses to acknowledge the reality of manmade climate change, with some of its members going so far as to call it a hoax – and demanding even greater consumption of dirty hydrocarbon power – while their constituents and communities suffer.

That brings us to today.

On Wednesday afternoon, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) – an outspoken conspiracy theorist and defender of the fossil fuel cabal – authored a Twitter post that captured the cognitive dissonance within the American conservative movement.

"Why are so many food manufacturing and processing plants catching fire? Why did thousand of cattle all die in a heat wave? Usually just the old, sick, or weak die in stressful conditions, not the whole herd. Food security is national security," the freshman lawmaker tweeted.

There were quite a few predictable reactions:

This was not the first instance of outright denial by Greene. On June 13th, she told the Right Side Broadcasting Network that dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is actually a positive development.

“The temperature tracking is from the 1800s. We’ve already warmed 1 degree Celsius and do you know what’s happened since then?” she said. “We have had more food grown since then, which feeds people. We are able to produce fossil fuels, keep people’s houses warm in the winter. That saves people’s lives, people die in the cold. This Earth warming, and carbon, is actually healthy for us. It helps feed people, it helps keep people alive.”

Watch below via Ron Filipkowski:

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