GOP Senate candidates a pack of Deniers

by: Jay Stevens

Mon Oct 18, 2010 at 09:22:48 AM MST

With one exception, none of the Republicans running for the Senate - including the 20 or so with a serious chance of winning - accept the scientific consensus that humans are largely responsible for global warming.

The candidates are not simply rejecting solutions, like putting a price on carbon, though these, too, are demonized. They are re-running the strategy of denial perfected by Mr. Cheney a decade ago, repudiating years of peer-reviewed findings about global warming and creating an alternative reality in which climate change is a hoax or conspiracy....

...all are custodians of a strategy whose guiding principle has been to avoid debate about solutions to climate change by denying its existence - or at least by diminishing its importance. The strategy worked, destroying hopes for Congressional action while further confusing ordinary citizens for whom global warming was already a remote and complex matter....

The thing is, global warming has already had economic consequences for the American taxpayer. In addressing PSC candidate Travis Kavulla's gutless response to impending ecological catastrophe, I mentioned how climate change has extended the fire season 78 days in the last three decades, a primary cause of a 10-billion-dollar uptick (pdf) in federal forest fighting costs in the first half of this decade alone. And that's just one narrow element of our economy that's been affected by rising temperatures. Consider the costs to agriculture by the infestation of exotic weed species in the West abetted by warming mountain winters...

To be even an agnostic on climate change entails a willful obliviousness that borders on recklessnss if you're a public official. But to deny warming...? And we're talking here about Senate candidates -- you know, the ones that are supposed to be more thoughtful and careful when it comes to policy.

Unbelievable.