But on Capitol Hill this week, Republicans warned against rushing into action in response to the burning planet. “I don’t want to be lectured about what we have to do to destroy our economy in the name of climate change,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina. A Democrat, Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, last week blocked what could have been the nation’s most far-reaching American response to climate change. But lost in the accusations and finger-pointing is the other side of the aisle: All 50 Republicans in the Senate oppose decisive action to address global warming. Few Republicans in Congress now outwardly reject the scientific evidence that human activities — the burning of oil, natural gas and coal — have produced gases that are dangerously warming the Earth. But for many, denial of the cause of global warming has been replaced by an insistence that the solution — replacing fossil fuels over time with wind, solar and other non-polluting energy sources — will hurt the economy. In short, delay is the new denial. Overwhelmingly, Republicans on Capitol Hill say they believe the United States should drill and burn more American oil, gas and coal, and that market forces will somehow develop solutions to the carbon dioxide that builds up in the atmosphere , trapping heat like a blanket around a bloated Earth. “I’m not in a position to tell you what the solution is, but for the president to shut down oil and gas production in the United States is not going to help,” said Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho. President Biden is not proposing to end fossil fuel production. He wants to use tax credits and other incentives to accelerate the development of wind, solar and other low-carbon energy and make electric vehicles more affordable. The fact that scientists say nations must quickly cut greenhouse gas emissions or global warming will reach catastrophic levels doesn’t seem to worry many conservatives. In many ways, elected Republicans reflect the views of their constituents. A May poll by the Pew Research Center found that 63 percent of Democrats rated climate change as a very big problem, while just 16 percent of Republicans felt the same way.

Understand what happened to Biden’s domestic agenda

Card 1 of 6 “Build back better.” Before being elected president in 2020, Joseph R. Biden Jr. laid out his ambitious vision for his administration under the slogan “Build Back Better,” pledging to invest in clean energy and ensure procurement spending goes toward American-made products. Two part agenda. March and April 2021: President Biden unveiled two plans that together formed the core of his domestic agenda: the American Jobs Plan, which focused on infrastructure, and the American Families Plan, which included a variety of social policy initiatives. The Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act. November 15, 2021: President Biden signs a $1 trillion infrastructure bill into law, the result of months of negotiations. The president hailed the package, a revamped version of what had been outlined in the American Jobs Plan, as proof that US lawmakers could still work across party lines. “The Democratic Party has made climate change a religion and their solutions are draconian,” said Mr. Graham, who accepts the science of global warming. He is one of the few Republicans who supports putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions to encourage industries to clean up their operations. But Mr Graham rejected Mr Biden’s goal of halving US emissions by 2030, to try to keep the average global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels. That’s the threshold beyond which scientists say the potential for catastrophic effects increases significantly. The planet has already warmed by about 1.1 degrees Celsius. Mr Graham echoed the common refrain of Republicans that it would be foolish for the United States, historically the country that has emitted the most carbon dioxide, to cut pollution unless other big polluters such as China and India do the same . “The point for me is to get people involved, not just us,” he said. So he went with the Republican Party, where warnings of a disaster are derided as exaggerated, where technologies that do not exist on a sustainable scale, such as “carbon capture and storage” and “clean coal,” are hailed as saviors. At the same time, those that do, such as wind and solar power and electric vehicles, are dismissed as unreliable and too expensive. American leadership on a global problem is seen as foolish, bringing the domestic economy to its knees, while Indian and Chinese coal bury America’s good intentions in soot. “When China gets our good air, their bad air has to move,” Herschel Walker, a former football star and now Georgia’s Republican Senate candidate, explained last week. “So it goes into our good airspace. Then now we have to clean it up.” The party’s political attacks often focus on symptoms of the climate crisis, pointing to Central American climate refugees flocking to the southern border, poor “forest management” as wildfires burn, and environmentalists depriving farmers of water in record conditions. drought. For decades, Republicans and the fossil fuel industry have denied the science of climate change. That has slowly begun to change as evidence that the Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate has become undeniable and has begun to resonate with moderate and independent voters. Last month, Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader of the House of Representatives, released a conservative roadmap for tackling climate change. Lawmakers have also launched a House Climate Caucus to discuss solutions that Republicans can support. But Mr McCarthy’s climate plan calls for increased fossil fuel production. And last Thursday, when the Conservative Climate Caucus met with business leaders to discuss climate change, the gathering was dominated by talk of more oil and gas drilling. Fossil fuel company executives also criticized new federal rules requiring them to disclose business risks from global warming, according to a Republican lawmaker who was at the meeting. “Denial was the mode of delay,” said Jon Krosnick, a social psychologist at Stanford University. Now, he said of Republican lawmakers “they have to find some other way to delay.” Republicans involved in the issue say there has been clear movement since the day in 2015 when Senator James M. Inhofe, R-Oklahoma, brought a snowball to the Senate floor as proof that global warming was a myth. Some Republicans privately acknowledge that bipartisan trips to watch the glaciers melt in Greenland have settled any doubts they had about what’s happening on the planet. House Republicans have a series of incremental steps they say they will pass if they win a majority in November: encouraging investment in American renewable energy and restoring forests and wetlands to absorb carbon dioxide. Senators Kevin Cramer, R-North Dakota, and Bill Cassidy, R-Louisiana, have proposed carbon tariffs on imports from countries that are doing less than the United States to curb climate change. But many of those same lawmakers reject the idea that climate change is an urgent threat. If Republicans win the House or Senate in November’s midterm elections, “I think you can expect a much more aggressive approach to domestic energy production,” Mr. Cramer said this week. “That doesn’t mean we’re dropping climate as part of the agenda, but rather focusing more on technologies that advance all forms of American energy.” A Republican senator, Thom Tillis of North Carolina, called Tuesday for a “reasonable transition” to clean energy. Democrats, he said, “are trying to move much faster than the technology and the economy can absorb.” Republicans say Mr. Biden, hard pressed by uncompromising climate activists on the left, took such a maximalist approach to climate legislation that its collapse was inevitable. “The far left has screwed it up so much that Republicans may actually take the first real action on climate change,” said Benjamin Baker, president of the American Conservation Coalition, a center-right environmental group. But even Republicans trying to address the effects of climate change in their states seem to be having trouble recognizing the root cause of the problem. Last week, three Utah Republicans, Sen. Mitt Romney and Reps. Chris Stewart and Burgess Owens, proposed legislation to save the shrinking Great Salt Lake before its dusty remains choke the capital city that shares its name. But absent from the proposal — which included Army Corps of Engineers monitoring programs, ecosystem management and “potential technologies” to redirect water, strengthen canals and deal with drought — was any mention of climate change. So did an appeal on Friday by Mr McCarthy to save the giant redwoods in his area from fire and drought. In a Time op-ed, Mr. McCarthy blamed “decades of fire suppression and misinformed policies” for his state’s year-round wildfires, obliquely referring to “exacerbating drought conditions and extreme heat” without mentioning a climate change. . One of its co-authors, Rep. Scott Peters of California, a Democrat who helped write the Save Our Sequoias bill, declined to say why climate…