How Many Disasters Must Happen in Texas Before Greg Abbott Stops Denying Climate Change?

2024 republican national convention: day 3

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In February of 1978, the Commonwealth, God save it, was socked by a world-historical blizzard that flooded the coastal towns and screwed up the state for the better part of two weeks. Nightly, Governor Michael Dukakis appeared from the state command post to issue orders, and warnings, and so forth, as good governors do. That fall, he lost a primary to a Neandro-Democrat named Ed King who won because, as one of his own aides put it, “We put all the hate groups in a pot and let it boil,” but also because his campaign ridiculed Dukakis for his appearances during the blizzard, even to the point of making a joke out of his wearing a sweater.

My point is that, during his tenure as governor of Texas, Greg Abbott has seen a catastrophic hurricane in 2017, a catastrophic ice storm in 2021, and now, a catastrophic flash flood that has drowned up to 100 people, including children at a Christian summer camp. How many of these have to happen before Abbott, a denier of man-made climate change, pays a price for them? At the very least, he is complicit in politics that hand-waves the climate crisis out of which these disasters are derived. And that’s at the very least. Does barbed wire in a river on the border really count for more politically than twenty seven drowned children? The mind, she boggles. I’m concentrating a bit more on the state’s reaction because the national reaction to the tragedy already has been bent by performative politics. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is introducing a bill making “weather modification” a federal crime. From The Hill:

“I am introducing a bill that prohibits the injection, release, or dispersion of chemicals or substances into the atmosphere for the express purpose of altering weather, temperature, climate, or sunlight intensity. It will be a felony offense,” she wrote in a Saturday post on X. “I have been researching weather modification and working with the legislative counsel for months writing this bill,” Greene added.

Oh, swell. She’s Done Her Own Research. Greene, of course, is implying that someone in the federal government, probably a Biden or Obama mole, manipulated the weather so as to cause the flooding in Texas in order to blame the president, or DOGE, or both, a feeling that is quite general on the frontiers of Republican wingnuttery. (We decline to refer to a Republican “fringe” because there no longer is one, and Greene’s bill is proof enough of that.) It is true that clouds were seeded a few days before the disaster, but if we are seriously going to consider that in the context of Greene’s magical fantasies, we are truly, truly lost.

Has it really not dawned on Republican governors that, with the federal government so many of them support taking itself out of the resistance to the climate crisis, and with the national Democrats scared of touching the issue they should be using as a hammer on the opposition, the onus of that decision is going to fall on all of them? Already, we’re hearing bleating from red-state governors about crops rotting in the fields because the immigration pogrom has either deported or scared away a large part of the agricultural workforce. And here we have, Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen telling Politico how he came to appreciate the president who tried to beat him in a primary, and whose policies have not advantaged his state’s farmers.

The hog farmer spent 10 years on the University of Nebraska Board of Regents before running for governor as a Republican and butting heads with the dominant figure in his party—Donald Trump, who in 2022 endorsed Pillen’s opponent, a wealthy businessman who was a longtime, loyal ally.

“That’s history,” Pillen said in an interview in his office, where visitors are greeted by a sculpture of a hog named Petunia and his dog, Daisy, sits quietly at his feet. “Everybody has relationships. And hey, I’m thrilled that Donald Trump’s our president. China, the border, safety, cutting government and getting rid of the bureaucracy. Sign me up. I’m on board.”

I’m happy he’s happy. However...