In 2008, presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama both ran on a platform to combat climate change. In 2009, the House passed a cap-and-trade bill to incentivize businesses to cut emissions. The bill died in the Senate.
Nine years later, not a single member of the Republican House or Senate leadership raised an objection to Trump's decision to withdraw the U.S. from the 2016 Paris Agreement on Climate Change. This accord represented a consensus among the 195 signers that human activity is causing the planet to warm and that every country has a responsibility to do something about it.
Scientists first established that climate change was connected to human activity in the late 1950s. Evidence mounted steadily with better scientific technologies, including computer modeling. The basic science behind climate change is not disputed by any reputable scientist.
So how has this fact, accepted by virtually every other country, become a political football in the United States?
It's a familiar story of wealth and business interests subverting science -- in this case interest groups funded by fossil fuel industrialists David and Charles Koch. Republicans who denied climate science received generous financial backing. Those who supported laws to restrict greenhouse gases either changed their opinion or lost their seats.
Overnight, Republicans stopped talking about how greenhouse gases contribute to the warming of the planet. John McCain was once an environmental leader who co-sponsored bipartisan climate change legislation. Look in vain on his website today for mention of the Paris Accord or climate change.
I'm Deborah Booth, and that's my perspective.
