11 Ways the Republican Platform Attacks the Environment

By Ben Adler, Grist

19 July 16

he Republican Party’s 2016 platform, released on Monday at its national convention in Cleveland, has sections called “A New Era in Energy” and “Environmental Progress.” Both titles are inaccurate. Perhaps they’re meant sarcastically?

If you want a guide to what Republicans would do with full control of the federal government, you couldn’t get a better one than this 2,400-word part of the platform. Like the EPA/Department of Interior spending bill House Republicans passed last week, it makes the GOP’s incredibly radical agenda crystal clear: deregulate pollution, halt any action to prevent climate change, and expand fossil fuel use.

Here are the 11 biggest lowlights:

• Cancel the Clean Power Plan. This plan — the EPA’s program to reduce carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants — is the most important piece of President Obama’s climate agenda. The GOP platform dismisses it as part of “the President’s war on coal”: “The Democratic Party does not understand that coal is an abundant, clean, affordable, reliable domestic energy resource. Those who mine it and their families should be protected from the Democratic Party’s radical anti-coal agenda.” As Grist’s Rebecca Leber noted, this language comes almost verbatim from a pro-coal lobbying group. To call coal “clean” is just a falsehood. In addition to its massive carbon footprint, the burning of coal leads tons of conventional pollution such as smog, soot, and acid rain.


• Build the Keystone XL pipeline and more like it. “We intend to finish that pipeline and others as part of our commitment to North American energy security.” Republicans have long been fixated on how awesome Keystone would be, even though current gasoline prices might make it not worth building. If gas prices spike, though, Keystone approval could have major consequences for the climate as it would help bring more super-dirty tar-sands oil to market. This plank is basically the opposite of the Democratic platform’s call for the next administration to use a “Keystone test” and reject infrastructure projects that will exacerbate climate change.


• Kill federal fracking regulations. Because nothing should stand in the way of fossil fuel development.


• “Oppose any carbon tax.” Many conservative policy wonks support a carbon tax as the most market-friendly, efficient way to reduce carbon emissions. The Republican Party, though, is determined to quash anyone’s hopes of a bipartisan compromise on climate action.


• Expedite export terminals for liquefied natural gas. To liquefy gas, ship it across the ocean, and re-gasify it uses a lot of energy and results in a huge carbon footprint. Republicans want more of this.


• Abolish the EPA as we know it. The platform calls for turning the EPA into “an independent bipartisan commission” and shifting responsibility for environmental regulation to the states. This would remove the federal government’s ability to study the effects of pollution and establish safe standards. In a particularly Orwellian touch, the Republicans promise that a kneecapped EPA would adhere to “structural safeguards against politicized science.” That actually means safeguards against scientific findings they don’t like. In other words, they would politicize the science.


•  Stop environmental regulatory agencies from settling lawsuits out of court. Huh? Republicans have been pushing this for a while. Here’s what it’s about: When an agency doesn’t do its job of enforcing a law like the Clean Air Act — often the case, especially under Republican administrations — environmental groups sue to force it to. If the agency thinks it will lose, it may then reach a settlement and agree to do its job going forward. That’s what the platform aims to prevent. Fighting in court until every last appeal is dead can make cases drag on for years, and Republicans want to get away with not regulating polluters for as long as possible.


• “Forbid the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide.” This one pretty much speaks for itself. It would wipe out the agency’s ability to reduce emissions and slow climate change.


• Turn federal lands over to states. “Congress should give authority to state regulators to manage energy resources on federally controlled public lands within their respective borders,” the platform declares. The federal government controls huge swaths of land in the West and already leases much of it for oil, gas, and coal extraction. The platform is quite open about the fact that Republicans think states will extract more rapaciously. That’s precisely the point. And ultimately they want the land entirely under state control: “Congress shall immediately pass universal legislation providing for a timely and orderly mechanism requiring the federal government to convey certain federally controlled public lands to states.” It’s unclear which lands they are talking about, but it’s a safe bet that they mean those that could generate the most money through their despoiling.


• Revoke the ability of the president to designate national monuments. The platform calls for amending the Antiquities Act of 1906 to require congressional approval for new national monuments, and it also calls for state approval of new monuments or national parks. So there would be no more Democratic presidents protecting a sensitive, beautiful, or historically significant area from development if Republicans control Congress or the state where it is located.


• Halt funding for the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change. The UNFCCC is the treaty system through which the world’s 195 nations work together to avoid catastrophic climate change. To defund it would undermine the Paris Agreement that was struck last December and throw a huge wrench into global climate progress. That’s the point. The platform explicitly states, “We reject the agendas of both the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement.”

There’s also some random small-bore stuff, like opposition to listing the gray wolf or the lesser prairie chicken as endangered species. There are a ton of right-wing talking points, like declaring the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “a political mechanism, not an unbiased scientific institution.” And there are additional paeans to the virtues of increased fossil fuel extraction.

In one particularly impressive rhetorical backflip, after the platform calls for virtually eliminating all environmental protections, it then says, “The environment is too important to be left to radical environmentalists.” But most Americans support regulations for clean air, clean water, and reducing climate pollution. The real radicals are the anti-government extremists who would reverse 45 years of environmental progress.

This is a document aimed squarely at appeasing the party’s base. If nothing else, you have to credit the Republicans for their audacity. No wonder most of the GOP members of Congress who accept climate science are skipping the convention this year.

The Conspiracy Convention: Alex Jones and the Fringe Right Get Their Cleveland Spotlight

By Amanda Marcotte, Salon

19 July 16

Alex Jones drew adoring crowds near the convention as the division between mainstream and radical blurs for the GOP

he prime time programming for Republican convention hadn’t started yet Monday morning in Cleveland, but the true Donald Trump fan base came out in force at Settler’s Landing Park, a small green strip next to the Cuyahoga River. The crowd, composed mostly of angry white men festooned in either biker gear or T-shirts decrying Hillary Clinton, was there for the America First Unity Rally, hosted by a group called Citizens for Trump. It was a proud showing of what used to be called the “fringe” right, but is now the faction that, through Donald Trump, controls the Republican party.

But while the rally was ostensibly about rallying support for Trump, the true man of the hour was Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist who runs “Infowars” and who was there to claim his victory in destroying the last remaining strips of sense and reality-based thinking within conservatism. While other speakers, such as Sen. John McCain’s primary challenger Kelli Ward and talk show host Wayne Dupree drew applause and some whoops of support, it was only when Jones ascended the stage that the crowd really came alive, rushing the stage to get near their hero as he unleashed a stream of paranoid rhetoric that really only makes sense to his avid fan base.

“The establishment, George Soros and others have done everything they can to try to shut down our free speech,” Jones ranted as the crowd gazed upon him rapturously. “They tried to destroy our sovereignty. They tried to attack our Second Amendment. And everything they’ve done has blown up in their face. They are failing and Donald Trump is surging in every major poll across the country!”

“The answer to 1984 is 1776!” Jones added triumphantly, as the crowd joined in, chanting along with what was clearly a favorite slogan from his long-running media empire of radio shows, videos, and “news” stories that paint a picture of a world where every violent event is a “false flag” and the world is run by a shadowy conspiracy of “globalists” that seem, by the number of times his name was mentioned, to answer solely to the liberal-ish philanthropist George Soros.

It’s tempting to write off this rally as a fringe event that has no real bearing on what’s going on in the main hall of the Republican National Convention. But the grim truth is that, as the events in the Quicken Loans Center demonstrated, so-called “mainstream” Republicans had lost out and these folks, with views shaped more by paranoid urban legends than by ideology, had won the day by getting their guy, Trump, nominated.

“Donald Trump is finally saying the things America needs,” a Infowars shirt-wearing man from Morgan Hill, California who would only provide the name “Wade” to me, argued. “We’ve been on too long, side-stepping the issues, and trying to make everything politically correct.”

When asked how long he had been a fan of Alex Jones, Wade perked up.

“Since 9/11. He was the only one speaking the truth about 9/11 and is to this day,” Wade said.

When pressed about what this truth is, Wade continued by saying, “The planes sure as hell didn’t bring the buildings down.”

“Buildings don’t fall flat and go to dust,” he added, laughing ruefully at those who believe otherwise.

Jones is a long-time 9/11 truther, probably the most prominent one in the country. He is also tight with Trump, who has popped up on Infowars as an honored guest.

“Your reputation is amazing. I will not let you down,” Trump gushed while giving an interview to Jones in December.

Jones returned the praise, saying, “my audience, 90% of them, they support you.”

That certainly seemed to be the case with the crowd of Jones fanatics that turned out to Monday’s rally. The mutual admiration society between Trump and Jones is especially notable, as Jones generally sprays hate and disdain for all politicians, Democratic or Republican, who he views as “globalists” engaged in a worldwide conspiracy of villainy.

Wade had an explanation for why Jones makes an exception to this general rule for his orange-hued billionaire buddy.

“Trump’s not the typical Republican,” Wade said, thoughtfully. “Like Ronald Reagan, Trump’s hijacked the Republican Party for the people.”

“The people”, of course, is a hazy phrase. The folks at the America First Unity Rally certainly thought of themselves as “the people”. The rhetoric, from speaker after speaker, focused on portraying their audiences as the authentic America, one that has supposedly been marginalized by the forces of “political correctness”.

But, to my eyes, this group of people, at best, represented a very thin slice of America: Almost completely white, mostly male, paranoid, and sticking to an aesthetic that is best described as “defensively masculine”, with a heavy emphasis on biker gear and ill-fitting T-shirts. It was a crowd completely detached from any relationship to truth or facts — there was quite a bit of chatter about George Soros supposedly funding “agitators” to disrupt the RNC — and instead caught up, to an alarming degree, with the fact-free world according to Alex Jones.

People who fit this description aren’t small in number — Infowars has a healthy audience, needless to say — but they hardly represent the whole of America. But it’s not surprising that they feel vindicated, as if they were a truly representative group instead of a small and paranoid minority. After all, they just conquered a political party, and if the mood in the air was any indication, they think their candidate is about to win the presidency.