By Ken Silverstein
Climate change is becoming less a partisan issue than it is a generational divide. Many aging white males like Donald Trump, Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell deride the cause and instead insist that the America of yesteryear is still possible. But younger voters — both Republicans and Democrats — never lived during the 1950s and they are therefore unwilling to backtrack.
The green cause is similar to the one that rural America faced after the Great Depression and in the 1930s: As part of the New Deal, President Roosevelt created the Rural Electrification Administration to bring electricity and economic development to isolated sections of this country. Rural America was thus the beneficiary of forward-thinking policies — the same way that hard-hit coal states like West Virginia could now make a similar leap ahead.