Utah Lawmakers: What Climate Change?

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Last week, Utah--reaffirming its status as reddest state in the nation--took another jab at the vast international community that is trying to halt global warming when its House adopted a resolution that questions climate change, and criticizes federal programs aimed at curbing emissions.
 
Utah’s legislators originally drafted a resolution to combat the climate change “gravy train” before “climate alarmists....lock billions of human beings into poverty.” But they discarded some of the more incendiary language in the final draft. Still, the resolution seems to be a throwback to the recent golden age of the climate change deniers movement, which has since become relegated to fringe groups (and in an odd turn of events, to last election’s Republican vice presidential candidate).
 
The House resolution is nonbinding, and still needs the okay from the Senate. But passing with a 56-17 vote, it expresses clearly that Utah’s lawmakers don’t “believe in” anthropogenic global warming. This opinion reigns despite protests from scientists at the state’s religious-intellectual axis, Brigham Young University.
 
The conservative victory comes weeks after mistakes were found in reports put out by the prestigious International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Maybe Utah Rep. Mike Noel was riding the resulting wave of skepticism when he called carbon dioxide “essentially harmless to human beings.”
 
If you’re still drinking the carbon lobby Kool-Aid of ExxonMobil’s multi-million dollar disinformation campaign, just check out Bill Nye the Science Guy on MSNBC last week (see video below). He calls climate change deniers “unpatriotic”—a descriptor Utah’s legislators would probably be eager to deny.
 
(Photo by mikesalibaphoto; C.C. 2.0)
 
If you liked this post, take a look at this piece also on the climate change debate.