Not one Republican senator voted for the United States' first significant climate change legislation.
If anyone's left to write history, the GOP senators will be remembered like the good Germans who ignored Hitler and the Holocaust.
I thought at least Utah Sen. Mitt Romney would vote for the Democratic bill that seeks to reduce carbon emissions by boosting solar energy and electric vehicles. But Romney joined with Mitch McConnell's Republican goose-steppers.
While liberal pundits and progressives cheer the legislation, which is expected to pass the House this week and go to President Biden, environmentalists are criticizing the bill for concessions to the fossil-fuel industry, such as allowing the completion of a pipeline in Sen. Joe Manchin's West Virginia.
The legislation, two or three decades too late, will do too little to cut emissions and keep temperatures from soaring to unsustainable levels.
While environmentalists have long called for a carbon tax, the legislation instead calls for solar-power and electric vehicle incentives. The fossil fuel industry has reluctantly come to support a carbon tax, which wouldn't cost American families, but it remains political poison, especially to the GOP.
Once, Republicans recognized the threat of climate change. In George W Bush's administration, Lindsay Graham and John McCain were proponents of carbon offset credit swaps. But the GOP succumbed to oil industry money, and now Graham is among the senators who deny climate change.
The United States must take more immediate and extensive climate change action. The planet's future depends on the Democratic Party increasing its control over the House and Senate in the midterm elections. A Republican Congress will sound the death knell for human civilization.
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