"I am the only one who has not bowed, and will never bow, to this liberal orthodoxy."
Even for a party that wears its anti-science label almost with pride, the GOP has recently been outdoing itself on global warming.
"The dangers of carbon dioxide? Tell that to a plant, how dangerous carbon dioxide is," presidential contender Rick Santorum said at the Gulf Coast Energy Summit in Biloxi, Mississippi, on March 12.
And to prove that this wasn’t just off-the-cuff rhetorical excess, Santorum penned an op-ed for the conservative website Red State. He portrayed a belief in science as part of a deficient, anti-Christian, anti-American mindset.
“Of all the GOP candidates, I am the only one who has not bowed, and will never bow, to this liberal orthodoxy,” Santorum wrote in a March 10 column. “I did not pander when global warming seemed cool to the press and to Hollywood. We know that climate changes over time, that the Earth warms and cools over time. … The apostles of this pseudo-religion believe that America and its people are the source of the Earth’s temperature. I do not.”
Seconding Santorum’s viewpoint is James Inhofe, Senator from Oklahoma and ranking Republican member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Inhofe is doing the rounds promoting his new book, “The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.” (The title is taken from an infamous 2003 quote of his, where he called global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”) He was recently interviewed on a Voice of Christian Youth America radio show about his book, and here’s what he had to say.
“Well, actually the Genesis 8:22 that I use in there is that ‘as long as the Earth remains, there will be springtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night,’ ” the Senator said. “My point is, God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous."
This is stupefying, to say the least. To have a Senator deny a basic scientific fact based on religious belief is nothing short of astounding.
And—there are no two ways about this—global warming is a fact.
“Skeptics are rare among scientists who actually study the climate,” states a recent piece on Huffington Post. “A paper published in 2010 by the National Academy of Sciences found that 97 percent to 98 percent of climate researchers ‘most actively publishing in the field’ agreed that climate change was occurring.”
That is not likely to be of much concern to folks like Santorum and Inhofe. Neither will be studies such as a 2009 report from a think tank headed by former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan revealing that global warming is causing 300,000 deaths annually and affecting 300 million people. The Republicans are not known for caring what happens to people around the world.
How about this, though?
“About 3.7 million Americans live within a few feet of high tide and risk being hit by more frequent coastal flooding in coming decades because of the sea level rise caused by global warming, according to new research,” the New York Times reported this week. “By far the most vulnerable state is Florida … but Louisiana, California, New York and New Jersey are also particularly vulnerable, researchers found, and virtually the entire American coastline is at some degree of risk.”
You would think that Santorum and Inhofe would at least pause and take note of this, since it deeply affects that great undistinguished mass they claim to be speaking for—the American people. But Santorum and Inhofe are trapped in their own delusions, which, not coincidentally, mesh with the priorities of their Big Oil funders.
If you liked this article by Amitabh Pal, the managing editor of the Progressive magazine, please check out his article entitled "Fukushima Should Compel All Countries to Discard Nuclear Energy."