We often make great sport out of konztitooshunal skolar Mike Lee, the Republican senator from Utah whose understanding of the Constitution stopped somewhere short of the first Cleveland administration. But on Tuesday, he got up before the Senate to speak against the proposed Green New Deal as part of Mitch McConnell's trickeration to force a demonstration vote on the subject, and Mike Lee quite simply was a laff riot. And the senator, as you see, was generous enough to put both the video and the text of his statement up on the Intertoobz so none of us would miss it.

First of all, Mike Lee is very brave.

Unlike some of my colleagues, I am not immediately afraid of what carbon emissions, unaddressed, might do our environment, our civilization, and our planet. Unlike others, I am not immediately afraid of what the Green New Deal would do to our economy and our government. After all, it’s not going to pass today. Rather, after reading the Green New Deal, I am mostly afraid of not being able to get through this speech with a straight face. For Mr. President, I rise today to consider the Green New Deal with the level of seriousness it deserves.

He then proceeds to make a whole litany of funnies about how ridiculous the idea of a massive solution to an existential problem can be. (A lot of it is arrant bullshit. The proposal does not seek to ban airplanes, to name one of the stupid arguments in which Lee has wrapped himself.) He later dismisses even the idea of a federal solution to the problem, but he is good enough to share his own idea on how we're going to keep Louisville safe from overpriced beachfront housing.

The solution to climate change won’t be found in political posturing or virtue signaling like this. It won’t be found in the federal government at all. You know where the solution can be found? In churches, wedding chapels, and maternity wards across the country and around the world. This, Mr. President, is the real solution to climate change: babies. Climate change is an engineering problem – not social engineering, but the real kind. It’s a challenge of creativity, ingenuity, and technological invention. And problems of human imagination are not solved by more laws, but by more humans!

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WATCH: Sen. Mike Lee uses Reagan, a machine gun, and a velociraptor to argue against @AOC's Green New Deal https://t.co/q30t3Johaq pic.twitter.com/hluEacyvNE — The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) March 26, 2019

More people mean bigger markets for innovation. More babies mean more forward-looking adults – the sort we need to tackle long-term, large scale problems. American babies, in particular, are likely going to be wealthier, better educated, and more conservation-minded than children raised in still-industrializing regions. As economist Tyler Cowen recently wrote on this very point, “by having more children, you are making your nation more populous – thus boosting its capacity to solve [climate change].” Finally, Mr. President, children are a mark of the kind of personal, communal, and societal optimism that is the true pre-requisite for meeting national and global challenges together. The courage needed to solve climate change is nothing compared with the courage needed to start a family.

Of all the preposterous right-wing hand-waving at this problem, this is, to borrow a useful sketch from the Pythons, the semaphore version of Wuthering Heights.

And I'm sure that the people of Louisiana will all pitch in and fck like bunnies in order to produce enough babies to prevent the imminent arrival of the Gulf of Mexico. The state has been losing its southern portion for decades, a process that is helped along immeasurably by exacerbating events—like, for example, increasingly powerful hurricanes—that may be tied to the climate crisis. From The New Yorker:

Atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication—these are just some of the byproducts of our species’ success. Such is the pace of what is blandly labelled “global change” that there are only a handful of comparable examples in Earth’s history, the most recent being the asteroid impact that ended the reign of the dinosaurs, sixty-six million years ago. Humans are producing no-analogue climates, no-analogue ecosystems, a whole no-analogue future. At this point, it might be prudent to scale back our commitments and reduce our impacts. But there are so many of us—nearly eight billion—and we are stepped in so far, return seems impracticable.

It also seems that the United States government is utterly unable to cope with this existential crisis—and will be, as long as people like Mike Lee keep getting elected.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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