Is This What The Climate-Change Debate Has Come To?

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." — Upton Sinclair

Congressional Republicans choose to just ignore science and attack the EPA

Bradford Plumer
TNR

If you spend enough time listening to climate deniers speak, you start to recognize certain tropes and tics that crop up again and again. There's the personal conversion story, for instance. The skeptic explains how, once upon a time, he, too, blindly accepted everything climatologists had to say about how human activity is heating the planet. But then, as he began to pore over the evidence, the holes in the theory became readily apparent, and, more in sorrow than anger, the skeptic had to conclude that the scientific consensus was wrong.

Indeed, it's such a common theme that, yesterday, when Oklahoma senator James Inhofe kicked off his testimony at a House hearing on the EPA’s carbon regulations with a St. Augustine-like confession, it seemed obvious what would follow. Inhofe was testifying about a bill he has sponsored that would overrule the EPA’s scientific finding that heat-trapping greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare. “I have to admit—and, you know, confession is good for the soul,” Inhofe began. “I, too, once thought that catastrophic global warming was caused by anthropogenic gases—because everyone said it was.”

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