“They pay pseudo-scientists to pretend to be scientists to put out the message: ‘This climate thing, it’s nonsense,’” an impassioned Al Gore told attendees at the Aspen Institute Thursday. “Bullshit! ‘It may be sun spots.’ Bullshit! ‘It’s not getting warmer.’ Bullshit!”
Before going off to the Council on Foreign Relations to give a speech on foreign policy, former Minnesota governor and 2012 GOP presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty appeared on Fox & Friends Tuesday morning. Asked about his stance on cap and trade, he acknowledged that he had changed his mind. He added, “I denounced it for a variety of reasons, one of which is the science is bad and it’s in great dispute,” repeating once more that there is a “scientific dispute” about the issue of climate change.
There’s more bad news for water watchers in the Rocky Mountain West, where record snowpack from last winter has led to a dangerous runoff in some places, including Colorado’s Western Slope. The bad news is this season is apparently a statistical blip in a 30-year historical decline in Rocky Mountain snowpack, which provide between 60 and 80 percent of the water supply for the 70 million people living in the western United States.
GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, the Mormon former governor of Massachusetts who led the nation in government-based health reform, is already no favorite with the Tea Party-wing of the Republican electorate. He has now cemented that unpopularity by saying in public what he said in his book last year: that he stands behind the vast majority of the world’s climate scientists who believe that the planet is warming and that that’s a bad thing and that humans are no small part of the problem– not that he’s going to do anything about it, policy-wise.
Science is still unclear how much humans contribute to global climate change, but the consensus seems to be “it’s a modest amount,” former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty said Friday in an interview with WHO-AM’s Jan Mickelson.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee was the site of a climate change Colorado showdown Tuesday. Considering a bill that would block the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating green-house gas emissions, the committee’s majority Republicans voted in lockstep against broad consensus among the world’s scientists that climate change exists. Colorado Democratic member of the committee Rep. Diana DeGette introduced an amendment that asserted that greenhouse gases generated by human activity were the “root cause” of global warming. Colorado Republican Rep. Cory Gardner joined with the other thirty Republicans in voting down DeGette’s amendment and two other similar amendments put forward by Democrats.
While Al Gore’s passion for the environment helped him ascend to the highest political offices – and earned him a Nobel prize and an Oscar — he told a symposium audience in Aspen Friday night that the Colorado forests he learned to love on a road trip 40 years ago have plunged into despair no thanks to rising temperatures, poor political will and tiny insects.
The first of several promised clashes over U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulatory powers came this week at a hearing over a Republican bill that would block the agency from regulating greenhouse gases.
In the end, after some false starts and rhetorical meandering, the question was simple: Do you believe that carbon dioxide is a green house gas and contributes to climate change and therefore poses a serious health threat to humans? Al Gore and an overwhelming majority of climate scientists the world over answer a straightforward yes to that question. Most of the Republicans in Congress, however, answer no. Oil and gas climate “researchers” also answer no. Dr. Chris Urbina, the new Director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment didn’t seem sure how to answer the question, or at least didn’t know how to answer state Republican senators asking him the question at his confirmation hearing Thursday.
The Obama years have so far been a predictable boom-time for the army of anti-regulation lobbyists paid by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Center for Responsive Politics reports that the Chamber spent $276 million over the past two years lobbying against, among other things, health care reform, environmental protections and Wall Street regulations. The Chamber is the number-one spender on lobbying this year as in years past, but it is outdoing itself, setting records in its own outrageous largess. In just the last three months of 2010, the Chamber spent $50.9 million on lobbying at the federal, state and grassroots levels. That’s a step down from last year, when in the last financial quarter as health and financial industry reform were being discussed in DC, the Chamber spent $79 million from October through December to defeat or water-down Democratic legislation.
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