Republican presidential hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz told NPR in a Wednesday interview that the term “climate change” is the perfect “pseudoscientific theory for a big-government politician who wants more power.”

In the interview, Cruz recalled the global cooling arguments from the 1970s, telling NPR’s Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep that some of the same researchers worrying about global cooling as a threat in the 70’s, are the same people now telling people global warming is a problem today.

The Texas senator asked Inskeep if he remembered back 30 or 40 years ago when politicians were telling people ” … that we were facing the threat of an incoming ice age, and their solution to this problem is that we needed massive government control of the economy, the energy sector and every aspect of our lives. But then, as you noted, the data didn’t back that up. What they were saying was disproven by the evidence. The Earth was not cooling.”

And now, Cruz added, those researchers — the ones saying global cooling was a blight in the 1970s — are making out with millions of federal dollars to shift focus from global cooling to global warming.



“Whatever happens, suddenly these scientists, who are receiving government grants to keep researching this, and these politicians — and, interestingly enough, the solution they are proposing for climate change — massive government control of the economy in every aspect of our lives – is exactly the same solution they proposed for global warming, it’s exactly the same solution they proposed for global cooling,” the presidential candidate said of politicians and scientists pushing for more action on climate change.

Cruz and Inskeep eventually discussed solutions to the problems climate change might engender –namely, innovations springing up within the free market.

“I fully expect in 100 years or maybe 50 years or maybe even 10 or 20 years — I mean, change can be very rapid — that we will move to different energy sources than we are using today,” said Cruz, concluding his remarks on climate change, “I also trust that the innovation that will drive that will come from the American free-enterprise system. It will come from innovators putting capital at work.”

Read the full NPR interview here.

Follow Chris on Facebook and Twitter.



Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.