A Midterm Post-Mortem: Republican Control of the House and Climate Action

As I mentioned in my last post, it’s time for a midterm post-mortem.
Fortunately, Barbara Boxer kept her senate seat in California, and the Democrats held the senate, so Senator Boxer will remain chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works committee. Unfortunately, Henry Waxman will relinquish his chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, a post he held for two short years after beating out John Dingell for the position.
It’s unclear who will gain control of the House Energy committee. Grist, in a cross post from the Wonk Room, has covered the “intense leadership fight” for the committee. All four of the candidates are climate change deniers, including Joe Barton, now infamous for apologizing to BP during the Gulf Oil Spill.
Power in Congressional committees radiates from the chairman, and with such a wide move to the right, the proportion of seats on the committee will undoubtedly favor the Republicans. That’s bad enough. What’s worse is that House Republicans are likely to call hearings on climate change, a very real possibility suggested by the Los Angeles Times before the election and Andrew Revkin at the New York Times on Wednesday. The future looks bleak for climate legislation, and the Times writes, “If the GOP wins control of the House next week, senior congressional Republicans plan to launch a blistering attack on the Obama administration’s environmental policies, as well as on scientists who link air pollution to climate change.”
The last part of that sentence is rich, and telling. House Republicans plan to eviscerate scientists for… practicing science? The precision with which climate scientists craft their models and investigate disparate, unbelievably complex and difficult to analyze natural trends takes extensive education to understand. It is not elitist to state that very few congressmen, Democrat or Republican, would be able to grasp the intricacies of climate science in the context of a hearing.
Revkin notes the mixed reaction among scientists on how to approach congressional scrutiny, and questions whether or not scientists should appear before the committees if called. He points out that the scientists may have some obligation to appear, especially if they are receiving federal funding.
I’m not disinclined to agree with Revkin, but scientists should appear for reasons greater than just a matter of funding. They should appear before the committees on principle, because any other course of action makes it look as if they’re trying to hide. I don’t know whether or not going in front of a hostile committee will help their cause in the short run, but in the long run, taking a noble stand about climate science and the necessity of climate action now will matter most.
In other words, get the bastards. James Hansen, Michael Mann, and Harvard’s Dan Schrag – they all need to appear at any hearing they are called to and present the full weight of their data and their research. Chances are, House Republicans will find every way of belittling and attacking their research, but that’s still no reason to stand down.
While writing this post, I noticed that I unintentionally framed climate change as the cause of climate scientists – I referred to it as “their cause.” That is a powerful misnomer, because it’s our cause. No member of the current generation of Harvard students can afford to shy away from matters of climate change, and environmental issues at large. Environmental change encompasses every facet of policy or contemporary political debate. This has been said before and I’ll say it again: at this point, there aren’t even poor excuses for inaction.