At Garbage Day, Ryan Broderick writes: The New Culture War Issue Will Literally Just Be Ignoring How Hot It IsIn the last 48 hours:
— Dr. Lucky Tran (@luckytran) July 18, 2023
Rome beat its all time temperature record by a whole two degrees Celsius.
China beat its all time temperature record by almost two degrees Celsius.
Death Valley narrowly missed the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth.
And there's more to come... pic.twitter.com/0F7nYHvQWE
I suppose it shouldn’t shock me that right-wing influencers are acting like Extreme heat isn’t actually that extreme. It’s sort of the entire philosophy behind climate change denial.But I guess I just assumed that if the weather became extreme enough, at the very least, we could all agree that it was, in fact, extreme.About three years ago, Atlantic writer Charlie Warzel tweeted something that has always stuck with me. In regards to the then still-emerging coronavirus outbreak, Warzel wrote, “The coronavirus scenario I can’t stop thinking about is the one where we simply get used to all the dying. There’s a national precedent: America’s response to gun violence.” He was, of course, right about that.But I think he inadvertently summed up America’s national response to pretty much every large-scale systemic crisis we’re bound to face going forward. The weather’s going to keep getting worse and the right-wing media ecosystem will downplay or outright deny it, and, more often than not, they’ll find ways to tie the acknowledgement of it to definitions of masculinity.And just like the folks who thought they could ride out the pandemic without a vaccine or masks because they were tough, only to end up on ventilators, so too will a lot of folks get hurt trying to man up and ignore the rising temperatures.
And here we go:
🚨NEWS: Amid record-breaking heat, Republicans are introducing legislation to block any president from declaring a climate emergency.
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) July 19, 2023
Fossil fuel donors funneled more than $5 million to the bill sponsors — and some of the lawmakers are oil/gas investors. https://t.co/l5p4GblIS0
