Why won't the Republican party abandon its platform of denial and agree to do something about climate change?
It's all Al Gore's fault, you see.
"Before we can be bipartisan we gotta figure out where we are as a party. What is the environmental platform of the Republican party?," Graham asked a silent crowd at an event at the Council on Foreign Relations. "I don't know either." [...]
"The problem is Al Gore has turned this thing into a religion," he said. "You know, climate change is not a religious problem for me, it is an economic, it is an environmental problem."
I'm sure future generations will feel much better knowing that Republican humans in the early 21st century did not get their act together because of petty political symbolism; because Al Gore is fat and occasionally travels in airplanes and limousines.
Before you know it, it will be 2020 and Republicans will still be dwelling on some thing Al Gore said or did in the mid 2000s.
When Lindsey Graham asks what his party's environmental platform is, the answer seems simple to me. Their platform is fuck the environment.
The Republican party is the party of fracking, of offshore drilling, of drilling in the Alaskan wilderness, of pipelines and lax regulation of them. The Republican party has voted several times over the past four years to completely defund the Environmental Protection Agency and the chairmen of various congressional science committees, which are controlled by Republicans, are all climate change and science deniers.
Lindsey Graham will not win the Republican nomination for president because he believes climate change is real.
Where is the Republican party at on the issue? That's where they're at.