This is beyond despicable

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The good news is the United States Senate just cleared a major hurdle Sunday by passing a massive $750 billion tax, healthcare and climate-change package by a very partisan vote of 51-50. The extra vote came compliments of Vice President Kamala Harris.

The bad news is climate science deniers have a brand new weapon in their climate change denialism arsenal. Instead of denying that the current abysmal state of the planet’s climate is caused by humans, they now admit that it’s caused by humans but that it’s too late to do anything about it! This new, insidious tack is supported by the oil and coal industries, of course.

I can’t think of any word in English to describe that. Words like “despicable” or “evil” just don’t fill the bill. But whatever you call it, there really do exist people on planet earth prepared to mortgage the future of the human race so they can make their huge money pile just a little bit huger. It doesn’t seem possible that anyone can be that depraved. It’s almost like evil for evil’s sake. But there it is.

What is now being called climate doomism is the new climate change skepticism. The sad part is some legitimate climate change scientists are supporting this nonsense as well. But no one yet can prove that there is such a thing as “beyond the point of no return.” In any case, as long as it remains a controversy, I, for one, intend to continue to fight like hell for a zero carbon footprint planet. And so should you.

Doomism is all predicated on the presumption that a climate change apocalypse will happen if we haven’t fixed things by a certain date, and that date has already come and gone. I don’t think that way, nor do most scientists support that idea. I do think that some pain is unavoidable, that we are already experiencing a great deal of pain, but we can make choices now that could greatly ameliorate future pain.

Unsurprisingly, climate doomism is a tack being adopted by rightwing politicians. Here in Britain, the human gadfly and waste of time Nigel Farage, not content with the damage he did by foisting Brexit on us, has become an overnight and ardent climate doomist. Such people in Britain and the United States will use their doom prophecies to undermine green energy solutions.

The ostensible reason for being a doomist is because “green solutions are too expensive.” The real reason is they want to continue to reward the coal and gas industry because they are being paid to do so. Doomism is recruited to discourage people from making the effort to combat climate change. Like I say, I’m having a hard time finding a word for that degree of depraved evil.

This sort of political aikido, using the most extreme instance of our very own arguments against us, is the ultimate hypocrisy. But conservatism doesn’t merely support hypocrisy, it’s defined by it. Watch carefully, as the predictions of climate science come to pass, Republicans will embrace climate doomism more and more. So if you’re waiting for them to admit they were ever wrong about climate change then you’re in for a long wait. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.

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