The West has suf­fered under a heat dome for much of the past week, with hun­dred-degree tem­per­a­tures extend­ing north into the Inland North­west, as Spokane swel­tered at 95 degrees on Fri­day and the Snake Riv­er val­ley hit the triple digits.

On Fri­day, the Inland Empire’s mem­ber of Con­gress, Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Cathy McMor­ris Rodgers, took occa­sion to chart America’s ener­gy future. She plant­ed wet kiss­es on the fos­sil fuels that are warm­ing the earth. “For ener­gy secu­ri­ty and afford­abil­i­ty, we must embrace a wide range of domes­tic ener­gy resources includ­ing coal, oil, nat­ur­al gas, hydropow­er and nuclear” came a release from the rank­ing Repub­li­can mem­ber of the House Ener­gy and Com­merce Committee.

U.S. Con­gress­woman Cathy McMor­ris Rodgers of Wash­ing­ton speak­ing at the 2015 Con­ser­v­a­tive Polit­i­cal Action Con­fer­ence (CPAC) in Nation­al Har­bor, Mary­land. (Pho­to: Gage Skidmore)

She didn’t men­tion solar pan­els and wind tur­bines, although one of America’s largest wind farms, the State­line project, sits atop hills on the Wash­ing­ton-Ore­gon bor­der west of Wal­la Walla.

Indeed, McMor­ris Rodgers has tak­en Twit­ter shots at Democ­rats for pro­mot­ing “a rushed tran­si­tion to less reli­able and more expen­sive solar and wind energy.

The sum­mer of 2022 has seen a dis­con­nect between Repub­li­can politi­cians of the South, Mid­west and Moun­tain West, and the swel­ter­ing, drought-strick­en states they rep­re­sent in Wash­ing­ton, D.C.

Just one thing brings on a chill these days: McMor­ris Rodgers will chair the Ener­gy and Com­merce Com­mit­tee should Repub­li­cans recap­ture con­trol of the House.

Even with the car­bon econ­o­my fuel­ing their cam­paigns, one is moved to ask: What are these peo­ple thinking?

They are embrac­ing coal at a time when it is being jet­ti­soned by the country.

Our state’s last coal plant, at Cen­tralia, is being phased out by agree­ment with the own­er. The Col­strip gen­er­at­ing sta­tion in Mon­tana is on its last legs.

Coal plants are pow­er­ing down across the coun­try. Few­er than 270 coal-burn­ing pow­er plants remain in the U.S., with more than 600 hav­ing been shut so far in this cen­tu­ry. Hawaii just shut­tered its last coal-pow­ered pow­er on Thurs­day, as part of its plan to tran­si­tion to hun­dred-per­cent renew­able ener­gy by 2045.

Glob­al warm­ing was hard­ly on the polit­i­cal radar screen back in the 2000 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign. With a deep pock­et pay­ing, young green activists showed up at can­di­dates bear­ing signs that read: “What’s your plan?”

What would the can­di­dates do to slow down or curb cli­mate damage?

Only one per­son paid any atten­tion, Repub­li­can Sen­a­tor John McCain, R‑Arizona. When his cam­paign end­ed, McCain went back to Wash­ing­ton, D.C., dug into the sub­ject and held a cou­ple of hear­ings. He began to con­nect the earth’s warm­ing with heat in his home state and the already-declin­ing flow of the Col­orado River.

McCain was just about the last Repub­li­can to seri­ous­ly address the issue, an effort abrupt­ly end­ed in the 2008 campaign.

He picked as his run­ning mate Alas­ka Gov­er­nor Sarah Palin, who decried cap-and-trade pro­pos­als, to lim­it emis­sions, as “cap-and-tax.” Repub­li­can audi­ences chant­ed “Drill, baby, drill” when the Arc­tic Refuge was mentioned.

The Repub­li­can Par­ty seems to have adopt­ed a strat­e­gy of per­ma­nent denial, spot­light­ed in resis­tance to the mid-sum­mer Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act, the first real cli­mate action invest­ment pack­age ever autho­rized by Con­gress.

“It’s a gift to rad­i­cal envi­ron­men­tal­ists and the rich lib­er­al elites: It uses tax­pay­er dol­lars to sub­si­dize elec­tric vehi­cles while impos­ing even more tax­es to raise the price of gas,” thun­dered Sen­a­tor Ted Cruz, R‑Texas.

Hous­ton has just expe­ri­enced its hottest July on record.

Dal­las-Fort Worth has endured 41 hun­dred degree-plus days so far in 2022, suf­fer­ing a pro­longed drought fol­lowed by sud­den flooding.

Yet, here is Ted Cruz on Twit­ter last week: “Cli­mate alarmists have a polit­i­cal ide­ol­o­gy to pro­mote, and facts can’t get in the way.” (A tip of the hood­ie to Tyler Lin­festy, the teenage “plaid shirt guy” who rolled his eyes behind Don­ald Trump at a 2018 ral­ly in Billings, for “out­ing” the lat­est Cruz idiocy.)

Sen­a­tor Jim Inhofe, R‑Oklahoma, has pro­claimed glob­al warm­ing “a hoax” and once brought a snow­ball from out­side to the Sen­ate floor, osten­si­bly to demon­strate that the Earth was not warm­ing. (Neil deGrasse Tyson sub­se­quent­ly cre­at­ed this mem­o­rable video explain­ing the dif­fer­ence between cli­mate and weath­er: they aren’t the same thing.) Inhofe chimed in by describ­ing the Infla­tion Reduc­tion Act as “sub­si­diz­ing the lib­er­al coastal elites’ elec­tric vehi­cle purchases.”

In our state, Trump-backed 3rd Dis­trict U.S. House hope­ful Joe Kent told a recent ral­ly: “The cur­rent green agen­da is a stalk­ing horse to make Amer­i­ca weak. All these renew­able sources that we’re talk­ing about, it’s a pay­day for the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty, elec­tric vehicles.”

He is, of course, wrong on mul­ti­ple counts.

Cli­mate dam­age is being felt here, notably in shrink­ing win­ter snow­packs and the melt­ing of glac­i­ers that keep our rivers flow­ing and dams pro­duc­ing dur­ing sum­mer months… and the record for­est and range fires such as the 230,000-acre Car­leton Com­plex Fire in north-cen­tral Wash­ing­ton… and in the ocean acid­i­fi­ca­tion that threat­ens our shell­fish industry.

Sen­a­tor Maria Cantwell, D‑Washington, has wit­nessed China’s wind and solar devel­op­ment, urg­ing that the Unit­ed States deploy its resources to com­pete in the unfold­ing renew­able ener­gy econ­o­my of the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry. Instead, we have Repub­li­cans on the House Ener­gy and Com­merce Com­mit­tee snip­ing at West­ern Europe for mov­ing too quick­ly to jet­ti­son its depen­dence on fos­sil fuels.

In a New York Times puff piece last week, our green Gov­er­nor Jay Inslee spoke of Washington’s chal­lenge to the car­bon diox­ide econ­o­my, say­ing: “There isn’t a sin­gle Repub­li­can in my state who has lift­ed a fin­ger on cli­mate change.”

Sure makes progress tougher.

Alas, the right wing in Amer­i­ca is skilled in coor­di­nat­ing its disinformation.

Rupert Mur­doch’s FNC has chimed in with sar­cas­tic ridicule, much of it direct­ed at Cal­i­for­nia Gov­er­nor Gavin New­som for the Gold­en State’s deci­sion to phase out gas-pow­ered auto­mo­biles. Tuck­er Carl­son depicts West­ern Europe as a civ­i­liza­tion crum­bling because it has cho­sen to phase out coal.

The Repub­li­cans’ Ener­gy and Com­merce web­site car­ries pic­tures of Rep­re­sen­ta­tive McMor­ris Rodgers tour­ing the Colum­bia Gen­er­at­ing Sta­tion at Han­ford, the one nuclear plant that the Wash­ing­ton Pub­lic Pow­er Sup­ply Sys­tem man­aged to fin­ish (orig­i­nal esti­mate, $400 mil­lion, final cost $3.2 bil­lion) and wit­ness­ing fish lad­ders at Low­er Gran­ite Dam on the Snake River.

Defend­ing the dams has become a Repub­li­can talk­ing point ever since George W. Bush’s bloop­er ref­er­ence to “the riv­er on the Snake.”

As she holds forth about “the war on Amer­i­can ener­gy,” is it too much to ask McMor­ris Rodgers to dri­ve up the hills and wit­ness the State­line wind tur­bines? And learn of plans to expand the project?. Well, maybe it is since Trump took after wind tur­bines in his Penn­syl­va­nia ral­ly speech Sat­ur­day night.

We hear a lot on how the future of our democ­ra­cy is at stake in the 2022 mdi-term elec­tions, and the upcom­ing 2024 pres­i­den­tial campaign.

Wit­ness­ing the rapid­ly chang­ing cli­mate, and rapid­ly accel­er­at­ing impacts, the earth’s future hangs in the bal­ance as well.

Cathy McMor­ris Rodgers is acute­ly attuned to pow­er sources in the Repub­li­can Par­ty. She ought to pay atten­tion to what cli­mate dam­age is doing to the region of our plan­et that she rep­re­sents in Congress.