White, wealthy old men have the ability to move, to relocate their families, to build seawalls around their Palm Beach golf course compounds. They won’t ever have a conversation with members of the Native American tribes of southeastern Louisiana who are already displaced by rising sea levels. What are the odds they will ever be exposed to news about Pacific Islanders whose entire nations are going underwater?

I happened to catch a few minutes of Rush Limbaugh on the radio last week. This isn’t something I do regularly. I wish I could say that I tune in from time to time as part of a deliberate effort to keep an open mind to voices I disagree with. Or that I like to test how long I am able to withstand an onslaught of illogical bullshit before rising blood pressure forces me to shut it off.

It was purely accidental. I was off from work last week and so had some time in the car while picking up the kids from school. It happened to be about a week after Trump dropped his executive order dismantling climate and environmental protections. Rush had clearly had time to formulate what he thought would be a passable rebuttal to the outrage that his audience would find appealing.

Basically what he said was that there was no way that the Trump administration would knowingly act to destroy the planet – which is what he understood the backlash to be about. And the reason they would never do this is they have to live on this planet too. Trump, Bannon, Pruitt and Tillerson haven’t created some Planet B, nor secretly colonized Mars, where they can escape to once the catastrophic impacts of their policies hit, explains Rush. So it would be totally illogical and against their self-interest to pursue any agenda that destroys the environment. End of story. There’s no way Trump’s actions could lead to the dire consequences his critics are warning about. He’s not dumb enough to do that to the planet where he plays golf.

See how he falsely equates damaging the environment with making the planet totally uninhabitable for human life? Maybe I’m taking his bait and giving him what he wants, which would be for an environmentalist to “admit” that the consequences of the climate crisis aren’t likely to be so bad as to literally reduce the planet to rubble. But I don’t think so.

To me, this makes it crystal clear that the Trump-Limbaugh crowd is fundamentally unable to conceive of a situation other than the one they occupy as mostly white, wealthy old men. These folks have the ability to move, to relocate their families, to build seawalls around their Palm Beach golf course compounds. Rush reasons that his audience won’t ever have a conversation with members of the Native American tribes of southeastern Louisiana who are already displaced by rising sea levels. What are the odds they will ever be exposed to news about Pacific Islanders whose entire nations are going underwater?

These communities don’t have the means to go someplace else. They don’t have a second home that’s up on higher ground. For them, climate change DOES reduce their world to rubble.

To Limbaugh listeners, their reality might as well be on another planet, Mars would be a good example.

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