The Senate’s climate change inaction ought to be the scandal of the

Good morning. I’m Paul Thornton, and it is Saturday, Jan. 15, 2022. Let’s take a look back at the week in Opinion.

I love reading subscriber emails, even from regulars who offer criticism in a way that I can charitably call, well, uncharitable (you know who you are). One of the more frequent raps on me, especially during the pandemic and Donald Trump’s presidency, is that I take a “sky is falling” view of whatever I happen not to like. Take last week’s newsletter, in which I expressed concern that our refusal to consider business shutdowns to slow the Omicron-driven spread of COVID-19 probably meant that if any places would close in this wave, it would be schools — and the thought of more Zoom tantrums triggers a kind of PTSD-fueled foreboding for parents such as me.

Some of you said I was fear-mongering. Fair enough. But if you find my thoughts on the pandemic or politics or authoritarian Republicans annoying, brace yourself for a rhetorical meltdown on climate change.

What triggered this was The Times Editorial board noting the yawning gap between the public’s increasing alarm over climate change and Congress’ tendency to do little more than talk about it. I’d go a few steps further than the editorial board: The federal government’s failure to enact policies with the explicit purpose of ending fossil fuel use to spare our ecosystems needless upheaval and misery is nothing short of an epic national scandal, one that will soon be treated by historians with the same contempt as the appeasement of Hitler at Munich or the lies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. That acting decisively to avert certain catastrophe — mind you, worse than what we’ve already come to regard in California as the “new normal” of wildfire hellscapes and water shortages and 2,500-year-old Sequoias reduced to kindling — is no longer out of step with public opinion makes Congress’ timidity seem almost malicious.

There is plenty of speculation about the possible financial conflicts of interest that might motivate a certain Democratic senator from a certain coal-producing state to withhold his support of President Biden’s Build Back Better climate proposals. The facts provoking questions about these possible conflicts have been reported, and the relevant lawmaker should answer those questions forthrightly. But I have to wonder if the foot-dragging on climate change is just another example of senators being hidebound and blackmailed by their own tradition, something we’re seeing play out right now on voting rights and the filibuster.

And being really stupid on climate change is a Senate tradition.

The Senate, after all, is where Republican James Inhofe of Oklahoma famously brandished a snowball he found outside the Capitol as “very unseasonal” (it was February) and used it to question if 2014 really was the warmest year on record. (It was then, and it has since been eclipsed by every year since then.) The Senate has also been the…