Republicans can’t win the climate change debate. So they’re doing what’s worked so many times in the past: cheat.
Faced with daunting public opinion polls, conservatives have turned to an old, worn playbook of knowingly lying about Democratic proposals—in this case, President Biden’s climate change plan, which absolutely, definitely, obviously does not ban or even restrict the eating of meat, though that hasn’t stopped the the entire right-wing/Fox-News/wingnut echo chamber from tweeting and bleating about just that.
It’s this year’s “death panels.” Or “voter fraud.” Or “stolen election.” A dumb, incendiary lie that is obviously false to anyone who looks into it—but Republicans know that most of their base won’t.
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And so, behold the luminaries of 21st century conservatism: Rep. Lauren Boebert, chanting “stay out of my kitchen,” fatally incompetent Gov. Greg Abbott declaring that it’s “not gonna happen in Texas!”, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene calling Biden “The Hamburglar.” (OK, that one’s funny.)
Needless to say, Biden’s plan says nothing about reducing meat consumption. It is true that it would be great for the climate if Americans, who on average eat 222 pounds of meat per year, would cut down somewhat. If we reduced that amount by just 25 percent, we’d cut around 82 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions each year—1 percent of the national total.
But that idea doesn’t play well on Main Street, and everyone to the right of Jonathan Safran Foer knows it. So of course it’s not in the Biden plan. Indeed, during the 2020 presidential campaign, Elizabeth Warren said that raising the issue is “exactly what the fossil fuel industry hopes we’re all talking about.” If Americans do stop clutching forks and knives to eat quite so much bacon, it’s going to be the result of gradual societal transition (and fake meat, and ending subsidies of the meat industry), not government bans.
So where did this cockamamie idea come from? Like so many right-wing conspiracy theories, this one started small: a single article in the Daily Mail speculating about what might be necessary to reduce America’s carbon footprint. Among those speculations: cutting back on meat. Cue the Kraken.
There’s one clear reason Republicans are making up shit like this: because they can’t win on the facts. The lie that has served them well for 30 years, climate denial, now appears to be on its way out. Americans now overwhelmingly support meaningful action on climate change, including restrictions on their own behavior. According to a study released last week by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 74 percent of Americans support the Paris Climate Agreement, to which the US is now once again a party. Sixty-five percent say the government should do more to address climate change.
Obviously those numbers include a lot of Republicans—and not only moderates. Increasing numbers of evangelicals are coming to see fighting climate change as part of proper stewardship of God’s creation, and a responsibility to future generations. They remain a minority, but they are a growing one. If Republicans try to fight the Biden plan on the merits, they will lose.
Moreover, Biden’s actual plan, as ambitious as it is, draws on the hard lessons of failed climate plans before it. In some ways, it’s actually a very Republican bill, back when “Republican” meant fiscally conservative approaches to regulation, like focusing on market solutions rather than command-and-control regulations, investing in the private sector, and creating jobs in emerging industries. Of course that’s not what “Republican” means anymore, but you get the idea.
So why are Republicans railing against Biden’s plan? Because they’ve learned that this kind of lying tends to work.
Back in 2009, Sarah Palin wrote on Facebook that, “The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society.’”
That was complete hogwash, top to bottom. There were no plans for death panels. There were no plans for rationing care based on ‘level of productivity.’ On the contrary, the closest thing our society actually has to death panels are the private insurance companies that really do allocate and ration payment for essential healthcare, as AOC noted in 2018.
But the term stuck, enraging the nascent Tea Party, and revealing a certain naïveté about the Obama-era doctrine of “when they go low, we go high.” When they go low, Democrats often lose.
Amazingly, the Big Lie strategy has even worked in the wake of the 2020 election. Surely, if there were any large- or even medium- scale fraud in that election, it would have been uncovered by the bevy of lawsuits, the Trump loyalists in various state governments, and the Justice Department investigation. But no such fraud was found—as election experts have been saying for years now.
Yet that inconvenient truth hasn’t stopped Georgia from passing one of the most overtly racist package of voter restrictions in the last half-century (don’t worry, Texas is close behind, increasing access in white-majority areas and decreasing it in non-white ones). It hasn’t stopped Republicans from raising money on the basis of this Big Lie that seems impervious to facts, especially when Fox News and its ilk simply refuse to report them.
Maybe the Hamburglar myth is too ridiculous to stick in the wake of a global pandemic, record high temperatures, record wildfires, and measurable, visible impacts of climate change around the world. Maybe the truth is too serious to be laughed off with a joke.
Or maybe the ‘Burger Ban’ will be this year’s ‘death panels,’ replacing reality with madness.
