A political discourse against scientific evidence. Postulates of the ultra -right regarding climate change and their consequences have burst in a thunderous way into the public debate about how institutions should address an emergency of proven. The banalization of the effects of the increase in the planet’s temperature, whether in the form of torrential rains or increasingly virulent fires, is already a usual background rumor in parliamentary dialectical combat. And not just that. Because the growing capacity of Vox influence on the PP thanks, mainly, to its agreements in communities and municipalities, has managed to permeate the action of administrations that systematically cut green policies at the same time that the climatic crisis is accentuated.
The approach is simple and has more and more echo: climate change does not exist, it is an invention of the global left to feed “beach bars” and natural disasters pass because they have spent “all life.” A speech that the extreme right usually ornament with all kinds of disqualification and dazzling approaches. In parliamentary headquarters, Vox has been heard, for example, making a constant mention to the “climate fanaticism” or the “radical environmentalism” of Pedro Sánchez due to the deployment of ecological transition policies tildados of “Aquelarre”. And he has also developed his own theories about the evolution of the climate and its consequences, not already apart from science, but directly on his back to it.
“Climate change is not a threat to survival. Who decreed that the optimal temperature for humanity was 1850? When it rises 2.6 more degrees throughout the 21st century, the effects do not have to be disastrous. Today 17 times more people die of cold than heat. That the planet is hot, to begin with, it will avoid cold deaths.” The intellectual author of that line of ‘No investigation’ was Francisco Javier Contreras, deputy of Vox, who expressed himself in the Congress of Deputies during a meeting of the Commission for Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge.
But you can also find equivalent speeches between the ranks of the PP. The ex -contest of the Valencian Government of Carlos Mazón, Nuria Montes, dared to predict the positive impact of the increase in temperatures from an economic point of view. “If something good brings climate change, it is precisely the extension of the tourist season,” he said.
Because, more or less explicitly, the truth is that the main opposition party has also traveled in the discursive towards positions that question the climate evolution of the planet to take distance from great consensus in which it also cost him to land. Before even arriving at La Moncloa, Mariano Rajoy himself already ironized in his day with the ability to predict the increase in climate in that exhibition on a meteorologist. “If no one guarantees or what time will it be in Seville how are they going to say what will happen within 300 years?” He said then.
The Popular Party, subsequently, has joined the defense of the master lines of a green agenda demonized now by the extreme right but is part of the heart of the European Union policies. And that for a while to this part also the popular have put Diana for the influence of Vox.
Denialism and cuts
This same week, in fact, and in full wave of fires that have burned Castilla y León on the four sides, President Mañueco reduced relevance to the possibility of investing more in fire prevention and in the impact that the increase in temperatures or drought has on the virulence of the same. “Forest fires are cyclic and weather conditions, unpredictable,” he said, to draw a little less than inevitable panorama.
The president of the Junta de Castilla y León, precisely, blames him from the PSOE to be one of the regional presidents that symbolize the policy of cuts in fire prevention and in the precariousness of the Fire Department. The Castilian and Leonese opposition accuses the regional executive of eliminating control posts in the mountains and turning their criticisms in the figure of the Minister of the Environment, Juan Carlos Suárez-Quiñones, who in an interview in 2018 came to qualify as “absurd waste” the investment in fire prevention to take care of the mountains during the winter. From the PSOE they also remember that this past political course of the majority of PP and Vox in the Courts of Castilla y León knocked down an initiative “to protect and regulate the work” of forest firefighters.
In reality, the decrease in resources to fight fire is a general tonic among public administrations, according to the National Association of Forest Companies (ASEMFO). In a recent study based on official data on municipalities, communities and ministries involved, the association concludes that the item for fire prevention has collapsed in half from 1999 to 2022. If the sum of the resources of all administrations amounted to 364 million euros in 2009, with the most recent data of 2022 the amount was reduced to 175.8 million euros.
Globally, of the approximately 1,100 million euros that are allocated to the year-between central government and autonomous communities-to forest fires, “around 60% -70% are dedicated to extinction,” according to the general computation made by the WWF organization after tracing the most recent budgets.
And all this despite some steps taken by the central government from the Department of Ecological Transition. In 2024, for example, the Pedro Sánchez Executive the Statute that regulated the professionalization of forest agents to guarantee decent working conditions. A rule that today does not apply a single autonomous community and that has not even established the Department of Ecological Transition itself in the agents that are part of the forest fire reinforcement brigades.
In June, in addition, the Council of Ministers approved a heading of 115 million euros contemplated in the Plan for Prevention and Fight Actions Plan for the Forest Fire of 2025. And just three summers ago the government issued a decree to regulate the prevention and fight against forest fires that included obligations for forest land owners, in addition to a compensation fund to cover the expenses derived from forest fires.
The tendency of the administrations governed by the PP in which Vox is essential for governance is, however, to approach institutional denialism. Several popular territorial leaders, in fact, have paid in public of the European Green Pact designed to combat the climatic crisis and whose programs receive items from the EU funds for the restoration of rivers, rehabilitation of houses, sustainable transport or recovery of the coast.
After the Dana, Carlos Mazón came to qualify the green pact as a “climate dogmatism” that “goes directly against the essence of our economy.” Murcia Fernando López expressed in the assembly his explicit “rejection” to the European Green Pact. And the Aragonese Jorge Azcón referred to “wrong, that are wrong and objectively a nonsense” policies. Some postulates blessed by the National Directorate of the Party, which came to secondary the rejection of Vox in the Senate to a motion on that green pact.
So far this year more than 100,000 hectares have been razed throughout Spain. At the last minute of this Thursday, dozens of foci were remained active throughout the country in a crisis that has been charged at the moment the life of three people. The World Meteorology and the United Nations organization, in addition, that the next five years will be the warmest ever registered, with a probability of 80% that at least one of those years exceeds the current temperature record.
Source: www.eldiario.es
