Rhea Suh

Opinion contributor

For the first time in his four years as Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell is poised to call a floor vote on a plan to confront the rising costs and mounting perils of global climate change.

But don’t be fooled. The Kentucky Republican means to bury climate action, not praise it, in one of the clearest signs yet of how wildly out of step he and others in his party are with the best interests of the nation — and the people of Kentucky.

McConnell, President Trump, and other Republican leaders have no plan of their own for addressing the central environmental challenge of our time, and little but derision for those who do.

To prove the point, McConnell and other Senate Republicans want to make a show of voting down a resolution that outlines the aspirations behind a Green New Deal, an ambitious call to national action to avert climate catastrophe.

A master of Senate process, McConnell knows this resolution contains big-picture goals, not specific legislation: that’s for Senate committees to craft.

Indeed, before McConnell unveiled his scheme to try to shut down talk about a Green New Deal before the conversation can even begin, the resolution was slated to go before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. There, its animating ideas could be hammered out and refined through the customary process of hearings, expert insights and public debate.

That’s the last thing McConnell wants.

Since 1989, he’s received more than $3.3 million in campaign contributions from the coal, gas and oil industries whose fuels produce the carbon pollution that’s driving climate change. McConnell has consistently voted against legislation that would help us reduce that dangerous pollution and confront the widening climate crisis — while there’s still time to act.

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Our families deserve better. Nearly eight in 10 Americans — and more than six in 10 in Kentucky — understand the growing climate crisis we face; about seven in 10 expect our government to help fight it, and no wonder.

We just wrapped up the five hottest years since global record-keeping began in 1880. Of the 19 hottest years on record, 18 have occurred in this century.

Seas are rising, glaciers are melting, wildfires, storms and floods are raging.

Croplands are turning to desert, in parts of China, Kenya and Kansas. Entire species are disappearing. The Great Barrier Reef is dying.

Addressing this shouldn’t divide us red state and blue. Of the 15 states projected to pay the highest costs for climate change, 14, including Kentucky, voted for Trump.

Kentucky and its people are already paying the price.

Heat waves and attendant health threats are becoming more common, with the Bluegrass State on track to get 70 such days a year by 2050, a five-fold increase over current conditions.

Tourism is starting to sweat. Summer highs average a pleasant 87 degrees at popular Mammoth Cave National Park. That’s set to rise to a scorching 98 degrees, though, by century’s end, unless we take action now.

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Already, in Lexington, mosquito season lasts 10 percent longer than just a generation ago, exposing more people to the risk of the Zika virus and other diseases they carry. Scientists predict more frequent and prolonged droughts like the one that slashed Kentucky’s corn output in half in 2012. And they warn that graceful trees like the sugar maple and American beech will be vanishing from the Kentucky landscape by 2100.

All of this and more gets much worse, the science tells us, unless we cut our carbon footprint today, so our children don’t inherit climate chaos tomorrow. That’s why we need assertive climate action that helps us rise to this challenge and create millions of good-paying American jobs doing it.

The people of Kentucky hold proud ground in the history of our country’s economy. They deserve their place in powering our future.

A Green New Deal could help, by promoting a just and equitable transition to the clean energy future we need.

That means bringing clean energy jobs to the state’s hard-hit rural and manufacturing areas. It means shoring up pensions and health care coverage for coal miners. And it means providing retraining for those who lose their jobs in an industry that has shed two-thirds of its Kentucky workforce in just the past decade.

Big ideas seldom arrive fully cooked. Advancing the goals of a Green New Deal with actual bills will take months. If McConnell has helpful suggestions, or any plan at all for confronting the growing dangers of climate change, we’d all love to hear it.

What we can’t afford to do is to allow this vital national conversation to be choked off before it gets started, as one more way to enable big polluters and their Capitol Hill backers to block the action we need to leave our kids and our grandkids a livable world.

Rhea Suh is president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group with more than 3 million supporters nationwide.