The world once looked to America as a leader in economic, technological and moral progress. These days, however, China seems to be forging ahead while America has wavered, especially when it comes to the most pressing problem facing our planet today: climate change.
President Xi Jinping recently unveiled China’s plan to implement a national cap and trade program by 2017 and to donate $3.1 billion to help developing nations mitigate and adapt to the realities of global warming. Meanwhile, the Republican Presidential forerunner, Donald Trump, maintains that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon who is currently polling No. 2 behind Trump, is also a climate change denier.
In fact, aside from Carly Fiorina, the only Republican candidates who have spoken out in favor of man-made climate change, Chris Christie and Mike Huckabee, have since been silenced. Upon kicking off his presidential campaign, Christie, who got a first-hand taste of the dangers posed by a warming climate in the form of Hurricane Sandy, has taken to simply avoiding the topic whenever possible.
Christie’s evasive route, cowardly as it is, is, at least smarter than Huckabee’s. During a Clean Air rally in New Hampshire in 2007, Huckabee conceded the reality of climate change and declared: “I also support cap and trade of carbon emissions.” Huckabee, the shameless turncoat, has since become a vehement denier of climate change, and when asked about the comments he made on cap and trade in N.H., he boldly said (despite video evidence to the contrary), “I never did support and never would support it — period.”
Meanwhile, Fiorina has, up to this point, been able to play both sides of the fence by admitting the reality of climate science, while hiding behind the fallacious and spineless assumption that China isn’t going to reduce their emissions, so there’s no reason we should reduce ours. Now that China has taken serious steps toward correcting climate disruption, Fiorina and all the other clowns stuffed into the undersized Republican nominee car must now reevaluate their stances on this pivotal issue — or at least we can hope so.
China’s newly adopted policies on climate change reflect a well-founded, global sense of urgency on an issue to which America has stubbornly refused to conform. It is my hope that China’s recent commitments will demolish the spurious claims behind which Republican and Democratic leaders alike have hidden. No longer can Trump denounce climate change as a subversive foreign conspiracy to steal U.S. manufacturing jobs. Fiorina, and Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, for that matter, can no longer continue to justify inaction on the weak-kneed basis that “China isn’t doing anything.”
The reality is that China now seems to be taking the lead in combating this pressing, planetary peril, the threat of which far eclipses that posed by the targets of current U.S. wars, i.e. “terror” and “drugs.” The reality is that our nation no longer represents the voice of reason on the world’s stage. When we have a Republican Presidential forerunner who nonsensically and unashamedly professes that America is no longer a great country because, according to him, we’re getting screwed on trade deals with China, Japan and Mexico, while in the same breath extolling himself as the most militaristic person on the planet and denouncing climate change as a Chinese conspiracy, how can we expect the rest of the world to consider us reasonable, or even sane? It might be different if we denounced the madman currently dominating Republican polls — but we don’t. Rather than respond with justified repulsion and move away from this tragically misinformed miscreant, the Republican party and, I dare say, the nation as a whole, has inexplicably continued to gravitate toward him and his utterly indefensible positions.
We cannot allow this to continue. We must stand up to Republican leaders and those who blindly follow their immoral and irrational lead in denying climate change and silence them with logic. We must now hold our leaders, and ourselves, accountable for the deleterious effects that unfettered, short-sighted American energy development policies have had and will continue to have on the global community. In the home of the brave we must exercise courage and admit that we need to change our current patterns of behavior in order to secure a desirable and sustainable future, as China, Japan, Australia, Canada, the EU, and most of the rest of the world have already done. The first step toward retaking our position as a moral, progressive world leader is acknowledging that climate change is real and that we are contributing to it. The next step is to implement a national policy, such as cap and trade or a carbon tax, that not only serves to mitigate the effects of global warming but also acts as a symbol of America’s respect for science and our commitment to a better future. A requisite of this achievement is that the sane majority of Americans must vehemently reject the boisterous, absurd bellowing of most Republican presidential candidates. We cannot let our less educated compatriots fall victim to lunacy, nor can we allow our country to be run by its ludicrous dictates, lest we find ourselves trapped in a nightmarish state of paranoid delusion, literally walled-off from the rest of the world and from the judicious admonitions of reason.