The current majority Republicans in the US House of Representatives are anti-science and anti-regulation. While much of the rest of the world is trying to deal with the increasing negative impacts of climate change caused by rising greenhouse gases, Republicans are still denying humans have anything to do with it.
Republicans in Congress currently are trying to remove the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases by proposing to pass a bill entitled the “Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011.”
In the US House of Representatives, the New York Times reports that the bill, which would strip the EPA of its “power to regulate greenhouse gases“, actually “enjoys the near-unanimous support of the House Republican majority“. As such, conservative ideology seems to trump rational scientific opinion and the conclusions of the vast majority of scientists who do research on global warming.
As noted in the New York Times article:
Representative Jay Inslee, Democrat of Washington, is one of Congress’s most ardent advocates of strong action to combat global warming. Mr. Inslee brought to the hearing a two-foot-high stack of books and scientific reports, which he placed on his desk as a sort of totem of the robust science behind climate-change theory.
He used his question time largely to criticize Republicans as suffering from what he called an “allergy to science and scientists.” He said he was embarrassed that a country that sent a man to the moon and mapped the human genome could be on the verge of enacting a law that overturns a scientific finding based on the testimony of a few scientists who question the extent of human responsibility for altering the climate.
“If Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Einstein were testifying today,” Mr. Inslee said, “the Republicans would not accept their views until all the Arctic ice has melted and hell has frozen over, whichever comes first.”
He said that much of the skepticism about global warming in Congress and among the public has been fed by a campaign of disinformation from energy interests. He likened it to the tobacco industry’s efforts to discredit the finding that smoking causes cancer. “People with enormous financial stakes attacked that science,” Mr. Inslee said.
Republican ideology unfortunately threatens to trump science and reason. The American voters need to wake up and realize this blind Republican assault on science based decision making threatens our economic future and the livability of our planet. What good does corporate profit do anyone if the planet is not habitable because short term greed triumphed over long term survival?
This is just another example of the dire threat that this country faces if Republicans take over the Senate and Presidency next year. Republicans care more for passing legislation to benefit their corporate base and pushing irrational right wing ideology than they do in finding long term solutions to real problems facing the American people and the world.
