This year has been a bad one in North America. We've been dealing with extreme heat, drought, wildfires, and we aren't even halfway through the summer. Unfortunately, as this article in Foreign Policy points out, it's not going to get better any time soon and not until we start taking some serious steps to reduce our impact on the environment.
When temperatures soared in late June, U.S. President Joe Biden pledged $37 million to support wildfire mitigation projects in one hard-hit California county and promised to raise the wage of federal firefighters to $15 an hour. Earlier, in May, the government also announced that the Federal Emergency Management Agency would double the funding available for states to brace for extreme weather disasters.
But in Washington, Democrats have long faced political hurdles to combating climate change, particularly from Republicans. Former U.S. President Donald Trump famously called climate change a hoax and withdrew the United States from the Paris climate accord; more recently, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson dismissed the climate crisis as “bullshit.” These divides are also reflected more broadly in each parties’ base: Almost half of Democrats say addressing climate change is a top personal concern, compared to just 10 percent of Republicans, according to the Pew Research Center.
In June, a group of Republicans formed the Conservative Climate Caucus to address climate change—but the group has refused to endorse specific policies, and its leader, Rep. John Curtis, has said that climate change should not be called a “crisis.” And while a separate bipartisan infrastructure bill for $579 billion—which activists hoped would focus on combating climate change—earmarked $47 billion for climate resilience, it excluded Biden’s key measures, including a clean electricity standard, just when the havoc currently being caused by climate change was made most clear.
“The truth is, we’re playing catch-up,” Biden said in June. “This is an area that’s been under-resourced.”
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