Maybe Republicans Can Write Climate Plans to Suit Their Voters

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy represents a lot of territory in California. His district’s land area of 9,898 square miles, encompassing most of Kern and Tulare counties and a little bit of Los Angeles County, surpasses that of nine states. It includes the highest point in the lower 48 states, great expanses of desert, multiple military installations and some of the country’s most productive farmland. It is home to oilfields that until recently outproduced the entire state of Oklahoma, but also to giant wind farms and solar arrays.

McCarthy thus has to answer to oil workers and to renewable-energy workers, to people who depend on mountain tourism and to those who depend on the military-industrial complex. He also has to answer to farmers who lean right politically but are well aware that it’s been getting warmer — especially at night, with Kern County recording its highest-ever average summer lows in 2016, 2017 and 2018 — and extremely worried about what continued warming could do to the Sierra Nevada snowpack that makes farming possible in and around a place (Bakersfield, the district’s main city and McCarthy’s hometown) that averages less than 7 inches of rain a year.