A defining feature of American politics in the 21st century is the ability to be both shocked and unsurprised at the same time. That was certainly how it felt last month when I ventured out to the Newtown Athletic Club in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, to hear many of the Republican Party’s then-candidates for governor and U.S. Senate in a freewheeling forum in which one of the hot topics — as gas neared $5 a gallon — was energy policy.
In panels that included eventual GOP Senate nominee Mehmet Oz, I heard repeated calls to unleash what was seen as Pennsylvania’s buried treasure of energy resources through more drilling or especially new pipelines, even though these measures certainly wouldn’t lower the price at the pump in 2022, or arguably ever. Maybe I was a bit naïve, but with so many candidates, I thought that just one of them might vaguely acknowledge what matters most about “energy policy” — that Planet Earth is currently on fire.
Not only was this just weeks after a United Nations panel (I know, I know, the U.N. ... black helicopter stuff to this crowd) warned of what one expert called “a global humanitarian crisis and on a scale never seen before” without rapid action to keep those fossil fuels in the ground. Even in a world distracted by inflation and the war in Ukraine, it takes willful ignorance to ignore the nightly images from around the world of wildfires or steaming trash dumps. Since that debate, we’ve watched floodwaters devastate our most spectacular national park, Yellowstone, while Montana’s GOP governor hid on a Tuscan vacation (a plot twist you couldn’t make up).
