The
day after President Obama dropped some snark on climate deniers in the State of
the Union Address, I made a terrible mistake.
I
watched the Senate debate something that virtually the entire world has
accepted as un-debatable.
The
Senate voted on whether or not climate change is human-caused. According to the
Senate, it is, by a plurality of one. Forty-nine senators formally went on the
record as climate deniers.
Yikes.
Wow. Holy Cow. Or as they say in social media, OMFG.
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| Sen Whitehouse's good intentions undercut by Republican anti-science nihilists |
All
day Wednesday and into Thursday, the Great Deliberative Body pored over pros
and cons of the Keystone XL Pipeline. Jobs!! Thousands of them!! (or dozens of
them according to the State Department’s count of permanent jobs).
Senate that climate change is real and not a hoax.”
Astoundingly, it passed 98 votes to 1. Among the positive votes was Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), author of the book “The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.” Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) was the lone dissenter.
One
by one, Republicans took to the Senate floor and asserted that the climate is
changing, it’s always changing, and humans have nothing to do with it. The
out-parliamented Whitehouse suddenly looked like the Distinguished Senator from
Wile E. Coyote.
Enter
Democrat Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) with another amendment: Climate change is real
and significantly caused by human activity. For all but five Republican
Senators, that was going too far.
Five
Republicans crossed over to reality and voted for Schatz’s amendment. Lamar
Alexander (R-Tenn.), Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), Susan Collins (R-Maine), Lindsey
Graham (R-S.C.), and Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) sided with 45 Democrats, whose leader,
Harry Reid, sat this one out due to a recent injury.
The 50-49 plurality for
the amendment is actually a defeat, though, since Senate rules require 60 votes
on a “non-germane” amendment.
In
the Great Deliberative Body, it’s not good enough for 49 senators to ignore the
virtual scientific consensus and growing body of on-the-ground evidence, you
need to double down – especially with dozens of American citizens like me
following your every word on C-SPAN 2.
John
Barrasso (R-Wyo.) blamed the media. Despite voting for the Schatz amendment,
Lindsey Graham accused Democrats of using “gimmicks” and “tricks” to call
attention to climate change. He tossed in the “I am not a scientist” meme for
good measure. New Senator Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) stumped to bring offshore oil
drilling to his home state.
Then
came Inhofe. He took to the floor at about 6pm Wednesday, and again Thursday
morning, performing virtually the entire climate denial songbook. Deploying the
Senate’s less than state-of-the-art AV system of posterboards on an easel,
Inhofe displayed a Heartland Institute climate science poster (You may recall
that Heartland is the group that bought an ill-advised freeway billboard
likening climate change advocates to the Unabomber).
Then came another poster
showing the 1974 Time Magazine piece on global cooling.
Can
you name another science issue where a back-page magazine piece from more than
forty years ago becomes a cornerstone argument?
Inhofe
also came perilously close to denying that he’d ever called climate change a
hoax. Denying science can be really harmful, but if you deny the title of your
own book, you may have some unresolved issues. And in fairness, after watching
the Senate twist its own drawers over this for a day and a half, I may have
some of my own.
For
questions or feedback about this piece, contact Peter Dykstra at
pdykstra@ehn.org or Brian Bienkowski at bbienkowski@ehn.org.