Month 11, Day 18: Wait For It….Wait For It….Wait For It!

The outgoing GOP congressman from South Carolina, Bob Ingliss, was primaried by a tea-partier and lost, badly. He attributes this to his support for climate change legislation (and, indeed, for the notion that climate change exists at all). Now that he’s on the way out, he’s ready to educate his fellow Republicans.

Inglis, who has served six terms in the House, was soundly defeated by a more conservative opponent in a Republican primary this year and has blamed the loss in part on his belief in climate science, which hurt him with voters. Inglis made his frustration clear this morning at a House Science subcommittee hearing on the science of climate change.

“To my free enterprise colleagues, whether you think it’s all a bunch of hooey, what we talk about in this committee — the Chinese don’t, and they plan on eating our lunch in the next century, working on these problems,” Inglis said. “We may press the pause button for a few years, but China is pressing the fast-forward button.”

Inglis, ranking member of the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee, also took aim at “people who make a lot of money on talk radio and talk TV saying a lot of things. They slept at a Holiday Inn Express last night, and they’re experts on climate change. They substitute their judgment for people who have Ph.D.s and work tirelessly” on climate change.

This is the second letter this week to the NYT.

While it’s welcome news that Bob Ingliss has gone public with criticism of the GOP caucus’ rejections of climate science, it’s something of a tragedy that he didn’t take more advantage of his six terms in the House to educate his fellow Republicans on the matter. Given that there is a great deal of money to be made in so-called “green technology,” one would expect corporate-friendly conservatives to be champing at the bit for new investment opportunities. Instead, these “climate zombies” have donned an ideological armor that no facts can penetrate. Perhaps it’s because liberal Democrats (gasp!) think climate change is important, and Republicans cannot risk agreement with Democrats on anything anymore. Or they may believe global warming is the initial manifestation of their long-awaited Biblical Armageddon — which means that the new majority party in the US House is eager to bring about the extinction of our species. Uh-oh.

Warren Senders