A analysis has found that 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.
According to a recent study of statements made by current members, 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.
“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 also highlights examples of denial from representatives.
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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.”
Other instances are more recent.
“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.”
Climate-denying lawmakers have received a combined $52m in lifetime campaign donations from the fossil fuel industry, the report also found.
The research shows that the American public, perhaps uniquely among people in developed countries, is represented disproportionately by climate deniers. Although 23% of the entire US Congress is composed of those who dismiss the climate crisis, polls show the proportion of Americans who share this view is significantly smaller, by as much as half.
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
