This month’s issue of Rolling Stone magazine has a serious exposé about the politics of climate change titled “As the World Burns: How Big Oil and Big Coal mounted one of the most aggressive lobbying campaigns in history to block progress on global warming” (link to the article here).
The issue also includes an article profiling 17 environmental villains, titled “The Climate Killers“. Among the 17 are several politicians and “journalists” we have profiled (to put it kindly) here, including George Will (also see this post), James Inhofe, and Joe Barton.
This is just a sample of what our republican leaders have to say about climate change:
Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steel said on 6 March 2009:
“We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I am using my finger quotation marks here, is part of the cooling process.”
Republican Congressman John Shimkus said on 25 March 2009:
“If we decrease the use of carbon dioxide, are we not taking away plant food from the atmosphere”
John later elaborated
“…the earth will end only when God declares it’s time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth. This earth will not be destroyed by a flood…. I appreciate having panelists here who are men of faith, and we can get into the theological discourse of that position, but I do believe God’s word is infallible, unchanging, perfect. Today we have about 388 parts per million in the atmosphere. I think in the age of dinosaurs, when we had the most flora and fauna, we were probably at 4,000 parts per million. There is a theological debate that this is a carbon-starved planet — not too much carbon. And the cost of a cap-and-trade on the poor is now being discovered.”
Joe Barton, from a March 10 House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing: “Wind is God’s way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it’s hotter to areas where it’s cooler. That’s what wind is. Wouldn’t it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we mandated massive switches to energy, which is a finite resource, which slows the winds down, which causes the temperature to go up? Now, I’m not saying that’s going to happen, Mr. Chairman, but that is definitely something on the massive scale. I mean, it does make some sense. You stop something, you can’t transfer that heat, and the heat goes up. It’s just something to think about.”