“Climate Deniers” make up Nearly a Quarter of US Congress – Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

Climate believers claim climate skepticism is in decline, that a growing number of people are concerned about climate change. But if this is the case, why are there so many elected climate skeptics?

Climate change deniers make up nearly a quarter of US Congress

Climate denialists – 23 in Senate and 100 in House – are all Republicans and make US an outlier internationally

Oliver Milman and Dharna Noor
Mon 5 Aug 2024 20.00 AESTLast modified on Tue 6 Aug 2024 00.51 AEST

US politics is an outlier bastion of climate denial with nearly one in four members of Congress dismissing the reality of climate change, even as alarm has grown among the American public over dangerous global heating, an analysis has found.

A total of 123 elected federal representatives – 100 in the House of Representatives and 23 US senators – deny the existence of human-caused climate change, all of them Republicans, according to a recent study of statements made by current members.

“It’s definitely concerning,” said Kat So, campaign manager for energy and environment campaigns at the Center for American Progress, who wrote the report.

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“Of course the climate is changing,” the Texas senator Ted Cruz said in 2018. “The climate has been changing from the dawn of time. The climate will change as long as we have a planet Earth.”

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“We’ve had freezing periods in the 1970s. They said it was going to be a new cooling period,” the Louisiana representative Steve Scalise said in a 2021 interview, referencing long-debunked research that is often still cited by climate deniers. “And now it gets warmer and gets colder, and that’s called Mother Nature. But the idea that hurricanes or wildfires were caused just in the last few years is just fallacy.”

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“The amount of people at each end of the spectrum – alarmed and dismissive – were essentially tied back in 2013 but today there are three alarmed people for every one dismissive, so there’s been a fundamental shift in how people see climate change in the US,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, an expert in climate public opinion at Yale.

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Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University who has long studied anti-climate rhetoric, said it was “unsurprising” that the report found old-school climate denial is on the decline.

“It’s harder to deny the science when it’s so much more apparent that the climate is warming, that extreme weather is getting worse and happening constantly,” she said. “Nobody can deny the science with a straight face, given everything.”

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/05/climate-change-denial-congress

Activists like Oreskes claims climate skepticism is in decline, and climate concern is rising. But if this is the case, why are there so many elected climate skeptics in US politics? Why would people who are majorly concerned about climate change keep voting for representatives who oppose climate action?

I know this might be a difficult concept for climate activists and some climate scientists to grasp, but if your model disagrees with observations, you should keep the observations and discard the model.