The Republicans, the Sierra Club, and the environment

- John Muir (R) and Teddy Roosevelt at Yosemite

There's a lot of pro-life rhetoric from the Republicans but none of it seems to encompass the environment. This should come as no surprise, since Romney and Ryan and most of the Republican party don't believe in climate change (Read more about what Romney and Ryan think on this - Do Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney disagree on climate change?). Here's a bit from another article ...

[...] The Republican Party is notorious for this and a Romney/Ryan office would be no exception. Both of them have blatantly stated that they don’t agree with climate change, citing uncertainty within the scientific community as their reasoning.

While not denying climate change, Romney told a New Hampshire crowd last summer; “What I’m not willing to do is spend trillions of dollars on something I don’t know the answer to.”

Ryan is even less ambiguous about his views, and has attacked climatologists in a 2009 op-ed in which he criticised “the EPA’s declaration that carbon dioxide is a dangerous pollutant” and seemed to suggest a conspiracy scenario when making accusations that “leading climatologists make clear efforts to use statistical tricks to distort their findings and intentionally mislead the public on the issue of climate change.”

For those of you who think there is much scientific uncertainty with respect to global climate change, you couldn’t be more wrong; 97% of the scientific community agrees that the Earth is warming and 82% believe it’s a human-induced phenomenon (Doran & Zimmerman, 2009). Moreover, Republicans and the like often like to misconstrue semantics, claiming that climate change is ‘just a theory’.

What the general public doesn’t realize is that a theory is the most solid of an explanation you can achieve in science – it is essentially a fact. The problem is that the overwhelming scientific evidence in favor of climate change is at odds with the Republican oil and industrial agenda ....

Here's a short video from the Sierra Club, which endorses Obama for president. If you care at all about the environment, give it a watch ...