"Republicans pledge allegiance to fossil fuels like it’s still the 1950s"
Quotes in a story by Oliver Milman on how “Republicans pledge allegiance to fossil fuels like it’s still the 1950s”
“We are seeing desperate attempts to delay the inevitable, to squeeze one more drop of oil or lump of coal out of the ground before this transition,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at New York University. “They are looking to go back to a prior time, but the trend is absolutely clear. The stone age didn’t end for the lack of stones and the oil age won’t end for the lack of oil,” he added, paraphrasing a quote attributed to the former Saudi oil minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani.
The Republican backlash is characterized by a large dose of political posturing, according to Wagner. “If you have aspirations of higher office in some states, you just want to signal you will sue those hippie liberals,” he said. “These are delay tactics and some of them are very ham-fisted.”
A prior version of the article included this pull quote:
That quote, of course, is not mine but (typically) gets attributed to the late Saudi oil minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani.