New York Times columnist Paul Krugman argued Friday that the climate talks in Paris "could mark a turning point" in "solving the problem of global warning," and as such are the only event "future historians, if there are any future historians" will find worthy of remembering.
Or not, as "we may be doomed. And if we are, you know who will be responsible: the Republican Party." According to Krugman, the problem isn't that some Republicans don't believe in man-made global climate change, but that it's an "orthodox[y] enforced on a whole party by what even my conservative colleague David Brooks calls the 'thought police.'"
Krugman added that
climate-denial orthodoxy doesn’t just say that the scientific consensus is wrong. Senior Republican members of Congress routinely indulge in wild conspiracy theories, alleging that all the evidence for climate change is the product of a giant hoax perpetrated by thousands of scientists around the world. And they do all they can to harass and intimidate individual scientists.
In a way, this is part of a long tradition: Richard Hofstadter’s famous essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” was published half a century ago. But having that style completely take over one of our two major parties is something new...
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