You may have heard of the “contentious” interaction between Republican Clay Higgins and Raya Salter (an environmental lawyer) during a House Oversight & Reform Committee hearing on September 15, 2022. If you really need to see the interaction, I will link to it at the bottom, but just be aware that I’ll cover the meat of the conversation here and that the interaction itself is just ugly, with Higgins sounding like some kind of barely-educated cave troll (despite being a former law professor), Salter mostly just telling him that he needs to get some morals, and Higgins constantly claiming victory though no such thing occurred. Higgins also calls her “boo” a couple of times. Despite all that, there were interesting details about the interaction that bear examining.
Higgins and Salter both attempted to claim that their position had the blessing of Christianity, with Salter imploring Higgins to get right with God in terms of the harm that he is causing human beings by using his position of power to allow the continued poisoning of working class people (especially people of color) by petrochemical companies in his state (Louisiana). The reason toxic petrochemical release from factories affects people of color more than white people is because there are very long term systems of oppression that have both forced people of color to live near industrial areas and placed factories near where people of color live. I expect that Higgins doesn’t care about Black people, so if he “searches his heart” (as Salter put it), he will find nothing.
Higgins’s position regarding Christianity made a lot less sense. He noted that his interpretation of the Bible is that God gave man “dominion” of the Earth, and then he says that the original word in the original language had a meaning closer to “responsibility for taking care of it” which seemed to directly counter his position as a climate change denier. Although, to be clear, it seems like the current position of mainstream climate change deniers in politics is to ignore the issue of whether climate change is real and jump straight to saying that nothing can possibly be done. So it seems like his pointed defining of Biblical dominion was really just there to give himself moral cover, as if to say, “I know that God told me to take care of the Earth, so how dare you accuse me of not taking care of the Earth!” (I think the better response to this kind of incomplete argument is to say, “Well, then why aren’t you doing what God told you to do, ass?”)
Higgins also accused Salter of having “no answers” when it comes to what to do about climate change and the affect of toxic petrochemicals on human beings — implying that there are no answer to be had. This is an approach typical to people who want to defend the status quo, be they Republicans like Higgins, or Democrats like Hillary Clinton: They reduce the issue in such a way to imply that we can either do nothing or an extremely disruptive solution must be implemented all at once. In the case of Higgins, he recited a very long list of objects that are manufactured using materials created from petrochemicals and then demanded that Salter explain how all of these things could be replaced. This was an obvious trap, and Salter wisely did not take the bait. This kind of argument is a variant of the “Gish Gallop” — each of the products mentioned by Higgins is meant to become it’s own separate argument, and then each element of an alternative production strategy for that product can become a separate argument as well. It instantly becomes such a big conversation that it would take a week to complete — but Salter only had a few minutes.
I’m no fan of capitalism; however, I can tell you that a capitalist production process for any product can adapt to changes in the availability of any given resource given enough time. No Democratic Party politician is advocating for all fossil fuels to be banned at once, or even for all passenger cars to be replaced with electrics at once. Democrats are conservatives, after all, but at least have some kind of vague understanding that capitalism itself is in danger from climate change — and they want to conserve capitalism by making extremely slow changes to how it functions.
To get back to Salter vs. Higgins, the Salter position is that we can make slow change to resource availability and it will not break capitalism. Higgins’s position is that only immediate and complete change is available as an option, and that would clearly break capitalism. My problem with this framing of the argument is that Higgins is slightly more correct. As I said before, capitalism can adapt to slow change in the availability of any resource, but that isn’t what is required. Because human civilization has put off these changes for well over 50 years, it is now too late to avert catastrophe. The issue now is how many people will die, and the more slowly we make changes, the more people will perish.
Breaking capitalism through rapid change is now a moral imperative. Yes, the climate change science continues to say, “If we act now, we can keep the Earth below 1.5C of warming,” yet the detail of the word “act” has become more and more dramatic to the point that it is no longer possible to do the things that “act” encompasses without disrupting capitalism, and that disruption, in and of itself, will have to be so great and so significant that it will also be harmful to people. The more optimistic advocates of change are trying to tell us that we need to shift the burden of this extreme disruption in such a way that fewer people die — by severely disrupting the comfort and convenience of the relatively wealthy (e.g., most Americans). They de-emphasize the disruption of comfort and convenience because they know that their audience is immoral and would rather let most of the world die than give up their little luxuries.
I’ll quote Kai Heron from their Twitter:
I’ve said this before, but ecological politics today isn’t about ‘saving the planet’ or ‘solving the climate crisis’ as we used to be told. It isn’t even about staying within 1.5C of planetary heating. That’s over. It’s gone. Ecological politics is about limiting how many people die, how many are displaced, how many experience insufferable heat, floods, wildfires, and droughts. And it’s about how many species and habitats will be lost forever. This shift in our understanding is important for a couple of reasons. First, it defeats the ‘it’s already too late’ doomer crowd. Yes, it is too late. That’s why we should act. Second, it moves beyond narratives about how we have 12 years, 10 years, or three years, to act. Every decision made today that takes us further away from decarbonization, like the UK’s decision to pursue fracking, or the US and Europe’s subsidization of fossil fuels and refusal to grant reparations to the periphery, tips the scales towards greater death and destruction.
https://twitter.com/KaiHeron/status/1570103229232607232
I hope you will re-read that to gain the complete nuance. An apocalyptic level of climate change is now locked in, but that apocalypse becomes worse with every passing day that we do nothing. Since vehicle electrification and renewable energy production is being used to bolster economic growth rather than to replace fossil fuel use, we are continuing to do nothing, and it should be obvious that the Democrats’ slow change plan never seriously considered the science behind climate change; they, too, are climate change deniers in their own way. Yes, it is theoretically possible that some amazing technology solves the problem, but that isn’t happening — no such technology exists or is expected to exist in the near future. There are claims of such technology, but so far, all have been revealed as vaporware.
I’ll remind you that even though destruction of the Earth might be “part of God’s plan”, if you are advocating for that destruction to occur, you are going to Hell just like any murderer whose crimes were also “part of God’s plan”. You cannot be forgiven while you are still in the process of sinning against God, and participating in the destruction of Creation is just that.
Unfortunately, the only place you can see most of the exchange between Higgins and Salter is on Higgins’s YouTube channel.