by US politics is a 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 about dangerous global warming, according to an analysis.
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 a concern,” said Kat So, energy and environmental campaign manager at the Center for American Progress, who wrote the report.
The report defines climate deniers as those who say the climate crisis is not real or not primarily caused by humans, or who claim that climate science is not settled, that extreme weather is not caused by global warming or that pollution is warming benefic planets.
It also highlights examples of repudiation.
“The climate is obviously changing,” said Texas senator Ted Cruz in 2018. “The climate has been changing since the beginning of time. The climate will change as long as we have planet Earth.”
Other cases are more recent.
“We had periods of freezing in the 1970s. They said it’s going to be a new cooling period,” Florida representative Steve Scalise said in an interview in 2021, referring to long-standing research still cited by climate deniers. “And now it gets hotter and it gets colder, and it’s called Mother Nature. But the idea that there have been hurricanes or wildfires in the past few years is just a myth.”
Climate-denying lawmakers have received combined lifetime campaign donations of $52m from the fossil fuel industry, the report also found.
The research shows that climate deniers are disproportionately represented in the American public, perhaps unique among people in developed countries. Although 23% of the entire US Congress is made up of those who have dismissed the climate crisis, polls show that the percentage of Americans who hold this view is much smaller, as much as half.
Even when a quarter of US lawmakers deny the climate crisis, the American public is moving overwhelmingly in the opposite direction. Fewer than one in five people in the United States reject the results of climate science, according to various studies, and a long-running Yale University poll showed that only 11% of those classify them as “negative”.
Although this part of American public opinion has not changed much in recent years, a growing cohort is much more concerned about the climate crisis after warmer years and a parade of wildfires, storms and other events whose climate is about them. More than half of Americans are now “fearful” or “concerned” about climate change, according to Yale surveys.
“The number of people at each end of the spectrum – fearful and disdainful – was basically tied back in 2013 but today an alarming three out of every person is unemployed, so there has been a fundamental shift in how people view climate change in the US,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, an expert on climate public opinion at Yale.
Although the share of lawmakers who deny the climate crisis is impressive, it has been steadily decreasing in recent years. Just five years ago, 150 lawmakers denounced the crisis. But many elected officials who do not deny the crisis still use the anti-climate rhetoric and work to block policies to limit greenhouse gases.
Florida representative Mario Diaz-Balart, for example, has used the language of climate denial before, but recently described climate change as “more of a religion” – another form of “obstacles climate”, says the report. He also continued to oppose climate aid.
“There are many harmful ways to talk about and act on climate,” said So. “Just because they accept the scientific findings or say they believe in climate change, that doesn’t mean they aren’t still blocking climate action, or using rhetoric that is antithetical to climate action. “
Naomi Oreskes, a professor of the history of science at Harvard University who has long studied anti-climate rhetoric, said she was “not surprised” that the report found that old-school climate denial is on the wane.
“It’s harder to deny the science when it’s much clearer that the climate is warming, that extreme weather is getting worse and happening more and more,” she said. “No one can deny science with a straight face, given everything.”
However, she noted that the fossil fuel industry and its allies have long used different messages to assuage climate concerns. She said she wasn’t sure those other types of rhetoric were any less harmful.
“As far back as the 1990s, they were saying that renewable energy is not reliable enough, or they were saying that wind power … kills whales,” she said. “Is it so different from climate denial if you don’t deny the science but deny the possibility of solutions?”
Among ordinary people, Leiserowitz said the views of the relatively small group of people who deny that temperatures are warming, or who associate climate science with conspiracy theories involving Al Gore or the United Nations, are often exaggerated politically and widely. US society.
“This small minority of Americans is really vocal, they’re more likely to vote and they’re clearly more than adequately represented in the halls of Congress,” he said.
“They are punching above their weight and have an undue influence on the public square, in that most people don’t want to talk about climate change because they think half the country doesn’t believe in it. There is a culture of silence – the climate has joined sex, religion and politics as the topics that cannot be brought up at the Thanksgiving table.”
Political polarization and the prevalence of “safe” congressional seats, which encourage candidates to promote broader views in order to secure major-party contests, helped cement this imbalance, Leiserowitz said, along with a flood of donations from the fuel industry. fossil. .
