Posted late Tuesday afternoon, January 29, 2019.

Just catching up with this one. The quote’s from an article by Claire Elise Thompson at Grist by way of Salon:
In an interview on Fox News Tuesday night, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders dismissed Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s urgent calls to action on climate change: “Look, I don’t think we’re going to listen to her on much of anything, particularly not on matters we’re gonna leave in the hands of a much, much higher authority, and certainly not listen to the freshman congresswoman on when the world may end.”
“Higher authority.” That would be the Right Wing Christian version of God, a capricious demon with an allegedly benevolent plan for humankind which requires millions of innocent people to suffer and die every year but which ends with Christians being rewarded in the next life while rich Republicans get richer in this one. This notion that God is in charge, he knows what’s best for us, and we should leave things up to him isn’t really an article of faith. It’s an excuse not to care about other people’s unhappiness and misfortune.
“I’d like to help you friend, but God know what he’s doing, and who am I to question God?”
At any rate, coming across the article this morning reminded me I wrote a post on the subject back in November. I think it’s worth reposting, so here it is…
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“We know that our climate is changing. Our climate always changes and we see those ebb and flows through time…” Iowa Senator Joni Ernst speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union”, Sunday, November 25, 2018.
Remarking on the changeability of the weather in his adopted home state of Connecticut, Mark Twain said, “If you don't like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes.
Ernst missed her chance.
“If you don’t like the climate change now” she could have said, riffing on Twain, “ just wait a few millennia, it’ll ebb back. Or flow. Or whatever.” Of course, Ernst wouldn’t have said it to be funny. To tell a good joke you have to know what you’re talking about.
(You might have noticed that Ernst seemed to be pulling the usual climate change denialist’s trick of mixing up weather with climate.
“Climate is what we expect,” said Twain. “Weather is what we get.”)
I suspect that what Ernst would have liked to say was “God’s in his heaven and all's right with the world.”
This past Sunday morning’s bobblehead shows featured the typical line-ups of well-groomed and well-tailored conservative doubletalkers whose job is to reassure nervous establishmentarian journalists like Chuck Todd that the Republican Party is made up of serious-minded and responsible grown-ups with nothing but the best interests of the country at heart.
“Never mind the reactionary radicals in the Freedom Caucus,” the doubletalkers are there to say. “Pay no attention to the racists and yahoos in the state houses. Ignore the stated wishes of our voters. Don’t worry about the antics and ravings of the ignorant boob and boor in the White House. And whatever you do, don’t bring up our own actual voting records. We’ve got this. Relax and let us handle it.”
One of the things they’ve got handled is climate change.
The report on the dire progress of climate change came out on Friday---it was dumped into what the Administration would be the post-holiday news sink hole to disappear without comment or notice. Didn’t happen.---The doubletalkers on the panels were asked about it, and they did their job of trying to explain it away.
They don’t outright deny the scientific fact of climate change anymore. They know better than to do that if they’re going to keep wearing their disguises as serious and reasonable men and women. What they do is shrug it off. They’re not climate change denialists. They’re climate change shrugger-offers.
It’s happening. Maybe. The jury’s still out The science is still inconclusive. Intelligent people disagree. There’s reason to be skeptical. Didn’t they just have snow in parts of the country where they often have snow in November? And remember how when we were kids forty years ago scientists were predicting a new ice age? At any rate, it’s probably not as bad as they say, and it’s not happening as fast. We have time. It’ll all work out. The Market will take care of it. Innovation and incentivization are the key. Smart folks in the private sector will find ways to fix it or deal with it. And it may even be for the good. Nature is self-correcting. We can adapt. God has a plan.
The Right Wing position on climate change is ultimately a religious one, and it’s the same one behind their position on everything.
This is the way God wants it!
Of course, it’s actually and always the way the rich greedy bastards who own and run the Republican Party want it. The Republican position on climate change and global warming is dictated by Right Wing corporatists who believe government’s only purpose is to help them wring every last dime out of everything there is that dimes can be wrung out of, which is pretty much everything. Doing anything about climate change might cost them a dime or two, so they’ve ordered their Republican stooges in Congress to make sure nothing is done about climate change except to hurry it up.
Ernst played her part. She would. After all, she is from an oil state.
Iowa? An oil state, Lance?
Yep. Who do you think buys all that ethanol?
Ernst said any sort of federal response to climate change needed to consider the impact on the economy and jobs. The Iowa senator, who was recently elevated to a Senate GOP leadership position, talked up her state’s reliance on wind and solar energy, as well as biofuels like ethanol.
“There is a balance that can be struck there,” she said. “Again, in Iowa, as a state, we have set that standard, and it hasn’t been by mandating, it has been by incentivizing.”
Ernst calls ethanol a biofuel. Ethanol isn’t a fuel bio- or otherwise prefixed. It’s a fuel additive. A heavily subsidized one. Ernst's assignment is to keep Iowa agribusinesses that call themselves “farms” rolling in federal dough. The incentive here is easy money picked from U.S. taxpayers’ pockets.
The industry Republicans like Ernst are out to save is the fossil fuel industry. The jobs they want to protect are in the executive offices of oil company headquarters. The part of the economy they’re worried might be devastated is that part of it that’s dedicated to the care and feeding of corporate millionaires.
Excessive regulation is any regulation at all. The only incentive they support is the incentive to make the most money as fast as it can be made, and there’s more and faster money to made with an oil rig than with a solar panel.
The problem the rich greedy bastards have is there aren’t enough rich greedy bastards for them to win elections on their votes alone.
Generally, though, they can count on the votes of rank and file Republicans who, if they aren’t rich greedy bastards themselves, see their interests as aligned with those of the rich greedy bastards and their corporate overlords on the old What’s good for General Motors etc. principle. Beyond that they vote Republican because they are Republican which means they vote to keep their taxes low and to keep THEM in their place. Still, they aren’t always as selfish and narrowly self-interested as the rich greedy bastards need them to be.
To make up for any shortfall, the rich greedy bastards---the owners and bosses---have enlisted the “economically anxious” Right Wing white lower middle and working class in voting with their bosses against their own economic interests by inflaming and exploiting their angers, fears, bigotries, hatreds, resentments, and self-pity. This is an old story, but they’ve gotten really good at it the last few years because Donald Trump is really good at it. The rich greedy bastards and their political henchmen and women don’t just put up with Trump. They like him! He’s better at the inflaming and exploiting than Nixon and Reagan were.
Even so, Republicans couldn’t win elections in places where they routinely do without the votes of the most reliable Right Wingers---the Right Wing Christians who travel
under the name Evangelicals.
(All Evangelicals aren’t Right Wingers. All Right Wing Christians aren’t Evangelicals. But try telling that to the political media.)
These Evangelicals are easy marks---I mean natural allies of the corporatists on the issue of climate change because for them it’s inherently religious. It’s God versus Science, and Science puts man above God. They’re generally anti-intellectual. Education leads to thinking for oneself instead of listening unquestioningly and obediently to the preachers and elders. But science describes a universe that doesn’t need a god to have created it or to keep it running; and whatever its origins and mechanics, it doesn’t have humankind at its center.
Climate change must be either a hoax or it’s part of God’s plan. And if it is God’s plan then it’s for the best and there’s nothing to worry about. Nothing needs to be done about it by us because God’s handling it. Nothing can be done about it anyway because it’s what he wants for us.
Faith that God is with us, loving us, sustaining us and protecting us, that he’ll make sure that, no matter our troubles and sorrows of the moment, all will come out right in the end, can be a comfort and a basis for hope. It can inspire courage, instill strength, firm up resolve, and renew a sense of purpose. It can also lead to fatalism and induce passivity. Why bother to resist what can and ought to be resisted or at least not suffered without protest when it’s God’s will you’d be resisting and protesting.
In fact, resistance and protest might even be sins.
Life isn’t meant to be enjoyed. If it was enjoyable, we might get too attached to it. There’s no heaven on earth. Any attempts to build one are usurpations of God’s power and privilege.
Leave it to God. Trust God. He’s in charge. He has a plan, and we’re at the center of that plan. Even if things are awful it’s all for the best because God only wants the best for us.
The best for us is eternal life in heaven, of course.
Life here on earth is just a trial to test if we're worthy of heaven. What happens in the here and now doesn't matter except in our accepting it as God's will. So we can mine and frack and drill till the end. We can wring every dime out of the ground that we can. We can let the earth drown, burn, dry up, and blow away while Exxon rakes in the dough because it's God's plan.
And amen to that, say the rich greedy bastards in the choir.
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Back to today…
Ocasio-Cortez responded the way you’d think would shut a Christian like Sanders up. She quoted the bible at her. Trouble is AOC’s Catholic. Catholics think the bible means what the words in it mean. Right Wing Christians think it means whatever they need it to mean to serve their self-interest at the moment. Right Wing Christians are convinced they’re the only ones who know what God wants, which always turns out to be what they want. Convenient, huh?
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To read Thompson’s whole article, follow the link to “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gets biblical on Sarah Huckabee Sanders” at Grist.
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Photo up top is by yours truly. I took it back in the fall. October 24, 2018, to be precise. It's the marquee in front of one of the loneliest looking chruches I've ever seen. Seems like there's never more than five or six cars in the parking lot even on Sundays.
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