

Gov. Bobby Jindal waves as he speaks at the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, on Aug. 9. (Brian Frank)

On Monday, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) told attendees at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor on Monday that the Obama administration was comprised of "science deniers" because of its energy policies -- even as he downplayed the role of energy production in the problem of global warming.

The term "science denier" doesn't have a long etymology in modern American politics, being used largely by the left to excoriate those who ignore or downplay the evidence tying the burning of fossil fuels to the long-term uptick in global temperatures. (The governor spoke the day after NASA announced that last month was the hottest August on record.) Jindal agreed that humans contributed to warming, but offered that the extent of our role should be resolved by scientists.

Even if Jindal wanted to tackle the issue of climate change, he's in a political bind. He wants to run for president; he admitted as much yesterday. But Republicans are split on the existence of global warming, much less its cause, according to 2013 polling from Pew Research. Among more conservative Republicans, it's not a split: those who identify with the tea party think there's no evidence of global warming by a nearly three-to-one margin. Those are the people who likely will vote most heavily in the 2016 Republican primaries -- so even Jindal's admission that people play some role in climate change represents a political risk.

What's more, Louisiana is an energy-producing state. Jindal's job, quite literally, is to help the state's economy, and to that end, he'd like to see more oil exploration and the completion of the much-debated Keystone XL pipeline, which would begin in Alberta, Canada, piping a form of oil to Nebraska, where it then would head to the Gulf Coast near Louisiana. Jindal critiqued the administration's proposal to cut carbon emissions by 30 percent (as well as other proposals aimed at cutting down on pollution from fossil fuel consumption), arguing that the move would result in more energy production and consumption -- and more energy jobs -- overseas.

Jindal's suggestion that the administration is broadly hostile to energy exploration, or denying it as valuable, downplays a key bit of data. Thanks in large part to the technological innovations in hydraulic fracturing, oil production in the United States has expanded greatly since 2008. That year, according to the Energy Information Administration, the country produced about 5 million barrels of oil a day. In 2013, that was up to 7.45 million barrels -- nearly a 50 percent increase. The spike in oil production is, however, featured in a report produced by a group Jindal helps chair which advocates for more exploration. That report suggests that the government "focus on agenda-free climate research to best understand what may or may not take place regarding future climate changes."

The government has already done that, and it supports the consensus about what happens when oil and other fossil fuels are burned: It releases carbon dioxide, which if released into the atmosphere, adds to the problem of global warming. This is the source of the term "science denier," which is more commonly used to refer to people who downplay that link than those who want to address it.

Again: Jindal is in a tricky position. He wants to champion energy exploration and appeal to conservative voters while still positioning himself as a realist and a policy wonk, which was the main goal of Tuesday's speech. That puts him on the left-most outskirts of the 2016 field. How that evolves over the course of the campaign will be very interesting to watch.