Climate denialists – 23 in Senate and 100 in House – are all Republicans and make US an outlier internationally
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.
The report defined climate deniers as those who say that the climate crisis is not real or not primarily caused by humans, or claim that climate science is not settled, that extreme weather is not caused by global warming or that planet-warming pollution is beneficial.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair
That seems like a fair reflection of the US population who deny climate change.
most GOP voters just bleat what they’re told to bleat by fox news and the 0.001% who have a financial interest in never moving away from fossil fuels
But the amount of that is too damn high, too!
Which surely couldn’t have anything to do with underfunded schools, book bannings, and sensationalised news.
I wonder if the venn diagram of climate change deniers and those who receive significant contributions from the oil lobby is essentially a circle.
Koch brother: I missed how many? It’s a good thing my brother is dead or he’d kill me for not buying all of them! Well at least we have half the Senate, that’s all we really need.
They’re very good at making up things!
And that’s just the ones denying it…
Lots more understand it’s a real thing, but are perfectly happy we set record breaking fossil fuels production under Biden.
Because it’s one of the few things propping up “the economy”.
Unfortunately pulling coal out of the ground and shipping it to China where they burn coal less efficiently leads to even more climate change than just burning it here.
If the rest really cared, we wouldn’t be breaking records as we speak
i might be misreading your point - apologies if so.
shipping coal to china
Was this a general, global statement? Or specifically the US mining coal to sell to china?
Here’s an article about the records we broke under Biden:
https://www.vox.com/climate/24098983/biden-oil-production-climate-fossil-fuel-renewables
Here’s some specifically about shipping coal to China:
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/more-coal-is-being-shipped-by-sea-than-ever-before
But for your question:
Both. It’s not unique to the US, even though that’s what I was talking about. And China is (meant isn’t) the only country with few regulations buying it up.
Across the globe countries do stuff like a small amount of electric buses because voters do care about climate change. However as they use less fossil fuels, they still produce the same or even more. They just ship them to countries with less regulations resulting in more pollution before even factoring in the carbon costs to transport it.
Because climate change is a global issue, it still hurts the original country along with everyone else.
Thanks - to be clear I wasn’t challenging you, just asking a follow up question, I appreciate the sources!
No worries, I should have thrown some on the first comment.
People want things to better which is good.
But often they reflexively get mad when you point out things aren’t better just because some things around you are better.
If we’re going to fix a global problem, we need to look at the whole globe, not just what’s next to us.
This is exactly why I hate uplifting news about some places reducing their emissions or other pollution. It paints the accomplishments as happening in a vacuum, when in fact the problem likely has been moved elsewhere. If all the major countries are decreasing pollution but the global picture still shows an increase, are we really fixing anything, or just shuffling the numbers around?
Nature is the only one not lying.
Democrats too though instead of outright denial in words it is said in the antiquated politics they push
Care to explain?
One could argue that any cap-and-trade policy is performative bullshit since all carbon credit markets are just scams.
