Sen. Inhofe’s Science-denial Approach Would Have Made Dust-bowl Oklahoma into a Failed State
Related subjects: Carbon Emissions, Climate Change, Denver Lessing, Diplomacy & Politics, Energy Supply, Environment & Ecology, Opinion, Sustainable Development, U.S. Economy, U.S. Environment, U.S. Politics, U.S. news Comments (0)
Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) is fond of calling the entire global field of climate science “a hoax”, and not only advocates inaction to curb the unraveling of climate systems, but devoutly champions the expansion of the very activities that are driving the planet to crisis. Had he been in office during the catastrophic 1930s “Dust Bowl” and had he had any success in convincing government and farmers to apply such an approach, Oklahoma could have been turned into a permanent desert with the characteristics of a failed state in perpetual need of food aid and expensive imports.
As reported by the EnergyCollective:
Whatever the agreement from COP15 is called, one “delegation” heading to Copenhagen – the so-called “one-man truth squad” of infamous climate change denier Senator James Inhofe (reportedly now joined by Roger Wicker and John Barasso) – comes here to Copenhagen with the message that president Obama’s hands are tied in helping forge a global climate deal by the power Inhofe and his cronies wield (real or imagined) to sink any cap-and trade legislation that comes before it.
Inhofe, ignoring literally centuries’ worth of scientific data, insists the international scientific consensus on climate destabilization is a conspiracy aimed at undermining US industrial and commercial might and overthrowing democratic states with a global socialist regime. The ferocity of his attacks on the actual process of scientific research, peer review, and honest attempts at coordinating public service oriented responses, has made him infamous among mainstream scientists and political activists.
But Sen. Inhofe represents a rural state that is highly dependent on the stability of fundamental climate systems to be able to be productive as farmland and sustainable as an economic entity. In the 1930s, unsustainable farming practices, driven by widespread environmental degradation, the economic Great Depression, and price wars among farmers competing for the dwindling resources of consumer markets, led to the near total depletion of topsoil and farmland productivity in Oklahoma.
The Dust Bowl remains to this stay one of the most startling, sudden and catastrophic environmental failures, and much of the American government’s response to farming issues is now based on the lessons learned from that human-induced environmental catastrophe. Sen. Inhofe, who routinely votes for funding and regulation aimed at protecting Oklahoma farming interests, all of which is based on the kind of science used in climatology, now opposes the world doing anything at all to address the rapidly mounting global environmental climate crisis.
So far, over the last decade, as climate destabilization has taken root and accelerated across the planet, farming infrastructure has collapsed on land that feeds hundreds of millions of people. Efforts to respond to this spreading environmentally-driven agricultural degradation have shifted unprecedented amounts of international food aid, making the global aid system less flexible and less able to respond in times of immediate crisis.
Food prices have soared to record highs, as grain yields are pressured by reduced availability of arable land, soil erosion, water scarcity and increasing worldwide demand. Those record high prices have coincided with an escalation of transportation costs and a worldwide recession, thus contributing significantly to economic hardship even in the industrialized world.
Such market conditions may allow some farming interests to rake in windfall profits over the short term, but scarcity and increased demand also incentivizes over-cropping and price-wars. The stability of the farming sector is questionable, and Oklahoma has to grapple not only with market trends, but with the very real threat of the environmental fallout of climate destabilization itself, which could dry the skies and interrupt vital weather cycles on which the states’s entire agricultural output is dependent.
Had Sen. Inhofe been making the same case for how to deal with the evident environmental fallout of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s as he now makes for dealing with global climate change, and had he succeeded in establishing the view that nothing should be done to deal with what was so apparently a human-induced crisis, Oklahoma could have been relegated to desertification, chronic poverty and the economic status of a failed state.
What should Oklahomans think now of their senior senator’s zealous quest to obstruct progress on urgently needed measures to address climate destabilization and guard against its worst long-term environmental fallout? Perhaps they should question whether the senator is really interested in the science, or whether he seeks at all to serve the best interests of his state, or whether, he is actually motivated by an embarrassment of riches in donations from carbon-intensive firms?
CafeSentido Partner Sites: