How climate change could be America’s game-changer in 2020

Is it possible – is it even conceivable – that climate change could be the issue that recreates and redefines the demarcation between left and right in America?

Republicans reject global warming, much as Born-Again Christians denounce evolution, placing their trust instead in the six-day version inscribed in the Book of Genesis.

Donald Trump regards the green lobby as enemies of the state, and most of his party’s Senators and members of the House of Representatives agree with him. Some, it is true, will acknowledge between gritted teeth that the global environment is not in good shape. But they choose not to regard this as having anything to do with them. What matters to them is that the oil, gas and coal industries, together with Big Agriculture, should be allowed to get on with their patriotic business untroubled by the snowflakes of the Left.

Conversely, for Democrats, acknowledgment of the threat posed by climate change has become newly emblematic of the party’s ongoing rebirth. Do Democrats favour gun-control, improved health care, a more compassionate approach to immigration and a higher tax rate for the super-rich and big corporations? Sure. But they would trade the lot for a swathe of laws that reduce CO2emissions by 50 per cent and boost the fortunes of alternative energy suppliers and producers of organic food.

It should be obvious that the Democrats do not expect to have their way on any of this any time soon. They are not, beyond the excesses of rhetoric, expecting a revolution to sweep the nation. Rather they hope against hope to ease America into an era of transition that, if humanity’s luck holds, will slow the rate of environmental degradation to the extent that new technologies, as yet unknown or undeveloped, can take over the economy’s heavy lifting.

Republicans are having none of it. Trump’s choice to head the Department of Energy, former Texas Governor Rick Perry, made headlines in 2016 when he called publicly for the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency. He was also criticised for proposing that Africa use fossil fuels to boost electricity supplies so that improved street lighting might reduce the incidence of sexual assaults.

The EPA’s Trump-appointed administrator, Scott Pruit, who was given the job after spending years filing suit after suit aimed at exposing the agency as a fraud, was forced to resign inside of a year amid mounting concerns over alleged ethical violations. His successor, Andrew Wheeler, is a former coal industry lobbyist who has publicly questioned the validity of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change and is on record as opposing limits on greenhouse gas emissions.

Ryan Zinke, who headed the Department of the Interior, responsible for federal lands, including the national parks, had to depart early to fight charges of criminal misbehaviour, making way for David Bernhardt, who for years prior to his appointment had served as a lobbyist for the oil and water industry and reportedly keeps a card in his wallet to remind him of possible conflicts of interest.

All the above are Republicans. Trump himself, who famously withdrew the US from the Paris climate change accord days after taking office, rowed back last year on his previous claim that climate change was a hoax. Yet when a report from his own government scientists warned as recently as November that the effects of unchecked global warming would be devastating, he responded, Victor Meldrew-like, by saying, “I don’t believe it.”

Another disbeliever is 84-year-old Senator James Inhofe, who until the end of 2017, against all good sense, chaired the upper house’s environment committee. In February 2015, Inhofe was widely derided for producing a snowball in the Senate chamber that he had just picked up outside the Capitol building, claiming it as evidence that the world was not getting warmer. He is now chair of the Armed Forces Committee.

But the Democrats have not stood still. This week, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the newly-elected Democratic Congresswoman for New York’s 14th district, was the figurehead for a proposed “Green New Deal” that lumped together measures designed to combat climate change with others aimed at extending social justice to those at the bottom end of the income scale. The plan – drawing on the 1930s New Deal implemented by President Franklin D Roosevelt – is almost absurdly ambitious, calling not only for a 100 per cent, government-backed switch from oil and gas to renewables, but also for guarantees in the areas of higher education, social housing and secure employment for all U.S. citizens.

It will have come as no surprise that among the supporters of such an approach are the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and the President of the youth-oriented Hip Hop Caucus, Rev Lenox Yearwood. But also giving their backing, alongside, inevitably, independent Senator Bernie Sanders, are Democratic senators Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand – the latter two seeking their party’s nomination for the 2020 presidential race – as well as the leading economists JK Galbraith and Paul Krugman and the former UN Secretary-General Ban-ki Moon.

Not all of these were directly involved in drawing up the latest proposal, which many see as a personal advancement vehicle for the unprecedentedly pushy Ocasio-Cortez. But Republicans will have their work cut out for them if they seek to dismiss it as nothing more than the product of far-left crazies.

Not that they won’t try. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has said that he will bring an associated motion from Ocasio-Cortez to a vote “to give everybody an opportunity to go on record to see how they feel about the Green New Deal.” No prizes for guessing on which side he will come down. President Trump, meanwhile, is in no two minds about the green agenda. “It sounds like a high school term paper that got a low mark,” he told supporters at a rally in El Paso, Texas, devoted to drumming up support for his own crazy project, the southern border wall.

For decades, with Socialism never a marketable political stance, the left-right spectrum in America has run from left-of-centre, via the centre-right and Old School conservatism, to the extreme “Christian” right. But today, in the era of Trump, a sizeable section of the Democratic Party, with environmental protection as its number one priority, is lurching to the left and looking for support in every possible constituency, from first-generation immigrants and disaffected minorities to the privileged middle classes of the East and West coasts. They may not promise a wind turbine in every pot, but, if the public mood continues to move in their direction, they could yet end up giving the most wilful and self-indulgent president in US history a run for his money.