Page 25 - bne IntelliNews monthly magazine September 2024

bne September 2024 Companies & Markets I 25
As many as 23% of the 535 members of Congress are climate deniers. / Mathieu Landretti
bne:Green
Almost 25% of US Congress denies climate crisis Roberta Harrington in Los Angeles
Currently, 123 members of the current US Congress deny the scientific consensus of human-caused climate change, says the Center for American Progress (CAP), a think tank. That is 23% of the 535
total members.
These 100 representatives and 23 senators – all Republicans – wield “significant influence” on public perceptions of climate change as well as on the speed and direction of US climate policy, says the Democrat-leaning CAP.
Among the 90 newly elected or appointed members of the 118th Congress, 18 are climate deniers.
The climate deniers in the current Congress have received more than $52mn in lifetime campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry, says CAP.
However, the number of outright climate deniers in Congress is maintaining a downward trend from 150 in the 116th Congress, 139 in the 117th, and now, 123 in the 118th Congress.
Yet there are still prominent instances of outright climate denial, including from the majority leader in the house, Rep. Steve Scalise, a Republican from Louisiana.
Asked how his party is combatting climate change, the congressman responded: “We’ve had freezing periods in the 1970s. They said it was going to be a new cooling period. And now it gets warmer and gets colder, and that’s called Mother Nature. But the idea that hurricanes or wildfires were caused just in the last few years is just fallacy.”
Meanwhile, other members of Congress have shifted from outright climate denial to other tactics such as redirecting responsibility for addressing the climate crisis, such as deferring US actions to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions until other countries act first; portraying climate activism as alarmism; or spreading misinformation.
The Republican Party’s most prominent politician, presidential candidate Donald Trump, is well-known as a climate denier, having called it a Chinese hoax.
The deceit is not limited to climate change, notes CAP.
According to this analysis and other work from CAP, as many as 90 of the 123 climate deniers in the 118th Congress also publicly denied the legitimacy of the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
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