It’s much easier to list Republicans in Congress who think climate change is real than it is to list Republicans who don’t, because there are so few members of the former group. Earlier this year, Politifact went looking for congressional Republicans who had not expressed scepticism about climate change and came up with a list of eight (out of 278).
But with the GOP taking over the Senate next year – and with the Senate set to vote on approving the Keystone XL pipeline on Tuesday – the question again arises of what, exactly, prominent Republicans think about the evidence that humans are changing the climate.
Below is a roundup of some of the key climate change sceptics in the incoming 114th Congress. The list begins with committee heads, and includes all the members of the new Republican leadership teams in both the House and Senate. At the bottom are prospective 2016 presidential candidates currently on Capitol Hill.
That’s not to dismiss the rank-and-file, excited by the Republican party’s incoming hold on the committees that shape US environmental policy; their votes would be needed to hobble the Environmental Protection Agency or take other measures to stifle President Obama’s initiatives to reduce carbon emissions.
Senator Jim Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma
Incoming chairman of the Senate committee on the environment and public works
Inhofe is the poster boy for Republican climate change denialism, not only for his stridency on the issue but because he is the once and future leader of the key Senate committee on environmental policy. Inhofe will be able to lead the committee for two years before running up against term limits (he was also chairman during the last GOP Senate majority from 2003-2007). This time around, Inhofe’s committee is expected to focus on transportation and infrastructure bills.
But it seems likely that Inhofe will devote some energy to blocking the regulation of carbon emissions. We think this because on 12 November he told the Washington Post: “As we enter a new Congress, I will do everything in my power to rein in and shed light on the EPA’s unchecked regulations.”
Inhofe has called climate change the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” has said God, not humans, controls the weather, and has denied climate change in many other ways.
Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska
Likely incoming chairwoman of the Senate committee on energy and natural resources
Murkowski has said that climate change is real, but she also plays the other side, boosting oil and gas interests in her home state and challenging the EPA’s authority to curb emissions. “It doesn’t make sense to argue about how much global warming is caused by man – whether it’s 5% or 50%,” she said in April. “The best approach is to have a no-regrets policy.”
Congressman Fred Upton, Republican of Michigan
To continue to chair the House energy and commerce committee
Upton has used his post atop the energy committee, which he can hold for two more years, to attempt to stop the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases. He authored the 2011 Energy Tax Prevention Act, which passed the House but did not pass the Senate, which was then controlled by the Democrats. Here’s what the bill set out to achieve:
To amend the Clean Air Act to prohibit the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency from promulgating any regulation concerning, taking action relating to, or taking into consideration the emission of a greenhouse gas to address climate change, and for other purposes.
Here’s video of Upton in 2011 admitting the climate is changing, but declining to accept that humans have played a role in it. “I have said many times, and there was a report a couple of weeks ago that in fact you look at this last year, it was the warmest year in the last decade, I think was the numbers that came out,” Upton says. “I don’t – I accept that. I do not say that it is man-made.”
Congressman Rob Bishop, Republican of Utah
Likely to become chairman of the House committee on natural resources
As chairman of the congressional western caucus, Bishop has been a stalwart supporter of oil and gas interests. He has called specifically for curtailing the EPA’s regulatory power.
“If ever there was an issue that cries out for the full public scrutiny through the Congressional process, EPA-led regulation of climate change is it,” Bishop said in a 2009 news release.
“Despite the fact that scientific data underlying the studies of global warming appear to have been manipulated to produce an intended outcome, EPA officials disregarded the contaminated science, calling it little more than a ‘blip on the history of this process.’
“It is becoming increasingly obvious that the EPA is more interested in grabbing power over our entire country than in getting the science and the answer right.”
Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky
Incoming Senate majority leader
McConnell said he was “distressed” by the US-China deal to cut emissions announced this week. He was likely also surprised, as he spent his recent reelection campaign saying he would not consider emissions caps because “nobody else is going to do that,” as he told the Louisville Courier-Journal.
“I’m not a scientist. I am interested in protecting Kentucky’s economy, I’m interested in having low cost electricity,” he said.
Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas
Recently re-elected as Senate Republican whip
Cornyn’s view on a possible human role in climate change is insinuated for a Republican and doubly so for a Republican from oil country. Which is adamantly not to say he favors emissions regulations.
“I am not one that denies that human beings have an impact on the environment,” Cornyn said in a phone call with Texas reporters in May. “But I am sure not willing to put the federal government in charge of trying to micromanage the environment for the United States of America, nor for us to drive up the price of energy for people on fixed income, like seniors and people of modest means, by putting restrictions in place that other nations are not.”
Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota
Recently re-elected as Senate Republican conference chairman
Thune is another Republican who admits a potential role for humans in climate change. In May he was asked if climate change exists and is caused by humans. “I’m not denying that,” he said. “I’m simply saying that the debate ought to be: What are we going to do about it, and at what cost?”
Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming
Recently re-elected as chairman of GOP policy committee
Barrasso, a medical doctor who graduated from Georgetown and Yale, runs the committee in charge of summarizing and analyzing major GOP legislation. Last week he called the recently announced US-China deal “irresponsible” and “expensive.”
“To me, this is an agreement that’s terrible for the United States and terrific for the Chinese government and for the politicians there, because it allows China to continue to raise their emissions over the next 16 years,” Barrasso said.
“All of us want to make energy as clean as we can as fast as we can,” he said. “We want to do it in ways that don’t raise the energy costs for American families and impact their jobs, income, ability to provide for their families. Those are the issues we need to be focusing on.”
Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri
Recently re-elected as vice-chairman of the Senate Republican conference
Blunt has acknowledged that climate change exists and said “we have a social responsibility to help the environment.” He also has said, however, that the human role in climate change is unclear. “[Blunt] understands that any energy policy aimed at reducing greenhouse gases should be carefully considered in the context of America’s already fragile economy,” a spokesman for Blunt told the Springfield News-Leader in 2011. “The worst outcome is that we pass policies so onerous that we drive jobs overseas to countries where they don’t care as much about what comes out of their smokestacks as we do.”
Congressman John Boehner, Republican of Ohio
Speaker of the House
Boehner reliably pleads ignorance to punt on climate change. “Listen, I’m not qualified to debate the science over climate change,” Boehner said in May. “But I am astute enough to understand that every proposal that has come out of this administration to deal with climate change involves hurting our economy and killing American jobs. That can’t be the prescription for dealing with changes in our climate.”
Boehner called the US-China deal “the latest example of the president’s crusade against affordable, reliable energy that is already hurting jobs and squeezing middle-class families.”
Congressman Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California
House majority leader
McCarthy was a vocal opponent of Obama’s announcement last June of new emissions rules for coal-fired power plants. At the time he prepared legislation to hamper the EPA in its regulatory role, in what may be a preview of the Republican strategy to come. “We have legislation moving here from appropriations and others that we do a lot of our different riders on,” McCarthy said. “That becomes some of the most effective areas to combat it.”
As for whether climate change exists: “I think there are changes in the environment,” McCarthy has said. “There are a lot of items to contribute to it.”
Congressman Steve Scalise, Republican of Louisiana
Incoming majority whip
Scalise was a co-sponsor of the 2011 Energy Tax Prevention Act to stop the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions. “The Obama administration needs to finally abandon their radical climate change agenda that is killing jobs and increasing costs for American families,” he said in an August statement. “Four years after the Democratic controlled Congress rejected the president’s cap-and-trade scheme, the White House wants to sidestep Congress and commit the United States to a United Nations agreement which would ‘name and shame’ countries into adopting higher emissions standards. This just proves that the president is prepared to pursue his job-killing climate agenda at any cost, which the American people and House of Representatives will not stand for.”
Congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Republican of Washington
Recently re-elected conference chairwoman
McMorris Rodgers was a co-sponsor of the 2011 Energy Tax Prevention Act to stop the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions, a position in line with her staunchly anti-regulation record. As a member of the energy and power subcommittee, she was a key proponent of the 2011 law, saying, “We support it. We’re gonna get it passed.” She also has said, of Nobel-winner Al Gore’s work to raise an alarm on the environment, “We believe Al Gore deserves an ‘F’ in science and an ‘A’ in creative writing.”
Here’s McMorris Rodgers opposing emissions regulations: “That is not the right process. It is also not the right policy.”
Congressman Greg Walden, Republican of Oregon
GOP campaign chairman
Walden was a co-sponsor of the 2011 Energy Tax Prevention Act to stop the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions.
Congressman Luke Messer, Republican of Indiana
Elected as Republican policy committee chairman
In a 2013 editorial, Messer referred to climate change as a “social issue.” “Unfortunately, the president seems to be focused on everything but creating jobs,” Messer wrote. “He hardly mentioned the economy in his inaugural address, instead choosing to lecture on a series of social issues including the threat of global climate change.”
2016 contenders
Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida
Prospective 2016 presidential candidate
Rubio has taken different routes to denial, from saying he’s not a scientist to second-guessing the data. “I don’t agree with the notion that some are putting out there, including scientists, that somehow there are actions we can take today that would actually have an impact on what’s happening in our climate,” he said in a May interview on ABC News:
Our climate is always changing. And what they have chosen to do is take a handful of decades of research and say that this is now evidence of a longer-term trend that’s directly and almost solely attributable to man-made activity. I do not agree with that.
I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it. That’s what I do not – and I do not believe that the laws that they propose we pass will do anything about it. Except it will destroy our economy.
Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky
Prospective 2016 presidential candidate
Paul was asked in April 2014 whether he believed “that climate change exists, and that it’s a manmade problem”. “I think that scientific debate should not be dumbed down to politics,” he answered:
I think this debate has become so dumbed down beyond belief. The Earth is 4.54 or 4.6 billion years old. Anybody who’s ever studied any geology knows that over periods of time, long periods of time, that the climate changes, mmkay? I’m not sure anybody exactly knows why. But we have twenty-, thirty-, hundred-thousand sort of year cycles that go on with the climate. It has been much warmer than it is today. We have real data [for] about 100 years. So somebody tell me what 100 years’ data is in an Earth that is 4.6 billion years old? My guess is that the conclusions you make from that are not conclusive.
Congressman Paul Ryan, Republican of Wisconsin
Former GOP vice-presidential nominee and prospective 2016 presidential candidate
Ryan restated his view on climate change in an October 2014 debate, in which he was asked if he thought human activity was to blame for changes to the planet’s climate. “I don’t know the answer to that question,” Ryan said. “I don’t think science does, either.”
Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas
Prospective 2016 presidential candidate
“The last 15 years, there has been no recorded warming,” Cruz said in a February 2014 interview with CNN. “Contrary to all the theories that – that they are expounding, there should have been warming over the last 15 years. It hasn’t happened.”
Other parts are going up. It is not – you know, you always have to be worried about something that is considered a so-called scientific theory that fits every scenario. Climate change, as they have defined it, can never be disproved, because whether it gets hotter or whether it gets colder, whatever happens, they’ll say, well, it’s changing, so it proves our theory. I am always troubled by a theory that fits every perfect situation.
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