Boring television while the world burns

It’s almost as if Democratic and Republican leaders met several weeks ago behind leather-upholstered doors to swirl brandy, puff Cohibas, and make a gentleman’s pact not to discuss climate change during their respective conventions. How else to explain the pointless shenanigans of the past week, when politicians avoided the issue as if a stray comment about emissions cuts or dwelling too long on the West’s wildfires might earn them a glove in the face and pistols at dawn?

Not that it should matter, but watching Mitch McConnell count twenty paces on the field of honor would have been far better television than the Democrats’ scripted wake and Republicans’ racist, antediluvian circus.

The New Republic’s Kate Aronoff has a piece out today addressing the question of why both parties have seemed hell-bent on sidelining global warming during their conventions. Democrats, with far less fossil fuel money flowing into their coffers than Republicans, may be running on an ambitious climate platform, but they mostly ignored it last week and even walked back a key promise to end fossil fuel subsidies. Republicans, as Kate points out, haven’t mentioned climate change at all: “They didn’t even call it a hoax.” (Someone check those speakers for a pulse.) Aside from some vague proclamations about American energy supremacy and jabs at expensive solar panels (inaccurate, as Kate notes), the party’s plan seems to be to avoid climate change and fossil fuels altogether.

This may seem odd, but Kate argues that it makes sense if you consider corporate America’s fracturing approach to climate change:

Executives in the insurance industry and on Wall Street—with its traditionally close ties to Democrats—have found the sort of outright climate denial associated with Trump to be a liability, particularly when doing business internationally. While tech magnates sell logistical support to drilling companies, companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Salesforce are eager to claim they’re helping save the planet. There’s a straightforward profit motive to looking green in 2020, a mantle easier to take up for tech monopolies than oil giants.

Further widening the gap between big oil and different arms of the corporate world, the fossil fuel industry is experiencing what may well be the deepest crisis in its short history; after having been the largest company on earth in 2013, ExxonMobil on Monday was unceremoniously removed from the spot it’s held since 1928 on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Just one oil company, Chevron, remains in the index. From Blackrock to BP, companies are trying to cash in on climate-friendly branding for what are now merely common-sense investment decisions.

Two-thirds of U.S. adults, according to Pew polling, think the government is doing too little to fight climate change. Depending on which polls you look at (the coronavirus affected polling on what is and isn’t an immediate threat, for instance), a surprisingly large number of Republicans—perhaps as many as 40 percent—are in that camp. But the interests of big businesses that fund political campaigns may be more complicated. Facing these murky waters, both parties have more or less decided to avoid them—for convention week, anyway.

Whatever comes next, we might all need a little backroom brandy to help us through it.