The Republican Partys 2016 standard-bearer may be its standard-setter as well. | Photo: Gage Skidmore, some rights reserved
Commentary: In a diverse, pluralistic society disagreement is par for the course. We're expected to advocate for our own opinions, give conflicting opinions a fair hearing, and come to equitable conclusions that respect as many conflicting viewpoints as possible.
For this to work, players in the political process have to present their arguments as honestly, as ethically, as possible. Deception is the bane of democracy; a misinformed electorate cannot make the kind of decisions a citizen is called on to make in this increasingly complicated world. This is nowhere more important than in political platforms, the documents by which parties make their broad electoral positions known. Honest differences in your interpretations of the facts are one thing. Basing your political platforms on falsehoods is another. It's a betrayal of the voters, and of the very process of democracy.
Regardless of your political leanings, regardless of your feelings about individual candidates and the merits of each party's general political outlook, one hopes we can all agree that statements in a party platform offered up as fact should actually be factual. The environmental portions of the Republican Party's 2016 platform fail that test abysmally.
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This isnt a new criticism, as even traditionally conservative media outlets are starting to look askance at the stream of unverifiable assertions coming from the partys Presidential candidate, and it would appear that Donald Trumps disregard for pesky facts doesnt make him unique in his party. The 2016 Republican platforms environmental content consists mainly of the anti-environmentalist version of urban legends,
The untruths in the Republican platform's environmental planks range from the specific to the systemic, from those that can almost be waved off as minor misinterpretations of facts to those that utterly rewrite the scope of American environmental history. They include misstatements about physical sciences and misstatements about their opponents' motives and intellectual capacity.
That's not to say that other parties' environmental platforms are flawless; they are not. Bending the truth is an unfortunately common political practice, and more than one of the environmental policies advocated in the Republicans' platform are advocated with a bit more restraint by the Democrats as well. But for full-bore, open-throated misrepresentation of the facts on the ground in the environmental world, the Republican Party's 2016 platform is really a thing to behold.
In case you think this assessment is too one-sided, consider this passage from the platform's discussion of fossil fuel energy:
The Democratic Party does not understand that coal is an abundant, clean, affordable, reliable domestic energy resource.
Coal is certainly abundant. Affordable and reliable are subject to interpretation, so we'll let those adjectives slide. But not even coal's most ardent partisans usually claim that burning coal is clean. If they did, then you'd hear them objecting to the whole notion of a Clean Coal campaign, predicated on the more or less scientifically unsupported notion that coal can be made clean with enough research. (If it was already clean, it wouldn't need to be made clean.)
Here's another example. A theme that permeates the platform, in environmental planks and elsewhere, is that federal regulation is far too broad and needs to be scaled back. In the words of the platform:
The central fact of any sensible environmental policy is that, year by year, the environment is improving. Our air and waterways are much healthier than they were a few decades ago. As a nation, we have drastically reduced pollution, mainstreamed recycling, educated the public, and avoided ecological degradation. Even if no additional controls are added, air pollution will continue to decline for the next several decades due to technological turnover of aging equipment.
The assertion that the environment is improving is hard to reconcile with any objective view of a world where species are hurtling toward extinction, the oceans are increasingly laden with toxic microplastics, one human being in ten lacks safe drinking water, and increasingly frequent climate-change-related events threaten not just human safety but ecological stability.
But when you consider the passage that follows the above-quoted rose-tinted view, the rhetorical sleight of hand becomes plain:
These successes become a challenge for Democratic Party environmental extremists, who must reach farther and demand more to sustain the illusion of an environmental crisis. That is why they routinely ignore costs, exaggerate benefits, and advocate the breaching of constitutional boundaries by federal agencies to impose environmental regulation.
There is a small germ of truth in the platform's blatant untruth about an improving environment: in some developed nations, the U.S. among them, some of the worst pollution has been alleviated, and better practices adopted.
An awakened public bears much of the credit for these improvements, where they exist, and that includes innovative businesses looking to do things in a more sustainable way. But the main driver of environmental improvements, where they have happened, has been government regulation. And in each case, the current Republican Party is seeking to undo exactly those regulations that have driven the improvements, and those attempts are lauded in the platform.
For the most part, the air is cleaner in America because of the Federal Clean Air Act, along with corresponding state laws that augment the Clean Air Act's reach. According to the platform, the Republican Party wants
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The Republican Partys 2016 standard-bearer may be its standard-setter as well. | Photo: Gage Skidmore, some rights reserved 
