Democrats are only too thrilled to swing the spotlight to a debate about science. GOP skeptics muddle energy push

Republican strategists have laid out an aggressive game plan for seizing the high ground on energy during the August recess: talk about gas prices and jobs, jobs, jobs.

But some Republicans are straying from the script, spouting off instead about the Book of Genesis, claims about scientific conspiracies and arguments that the Earth is cooling. And they show no signs of stifling their skepticism — even at the risk of providing a stream of YouTube-worthy sound bites that play into Democrats’ own strategy, which includes painting the GOP as the anti-science party.


The Republicans’ skeptic caucus includes Texas Rep. Joe Barton, a former House Energy and Commerce Committee chairman, who grabbed headlines in April when he called Noah’s flood “an example of climate change,” and California Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, who told POLITICO that the idea of manmade global warming is a “fraud” and a “big lie.” Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), former chairman of the Environment and Public Works panel, has famously called climate change the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” a phrase he used for the title of his book on the topic.

( PHOTOS: Climate skeptics in Congress)

The skeptics don’t speak for all Republicans, but they complicate the task of GOP leaders who want voters to focus on their warnings that President Barack Obama’s climate proposals will wipe out jobs and raise energy prices. Meanwhile, Democrats — some of them eager to downplay the economic implications of Obama’s plans — are only too thrilled to swing the spotlight to a debate about science.

The pro-Obama group Organizing for Action has prepared for the August push by publishing an online database of dozens of Capitol Hill climate “deniers,” including House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Louisiana Sen. David Vitter, the top Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee. Boehner made the list for a 2009 interview in which he blamed carbon dioxide emissions partly on “every cow in the world, you know, when they do what they do.”

Keep those comments coming, Democrats and their allies say.

“Having Inhofe, Vitter, Boehner, et al., publicly denying the science in extreme terms can only help speed the long-term demographic and political changes that could make Republicans a minority party at the national level for a decade or more,” one well-known environmentalist said by email.

( Also on POLITICO: Dems' recess plan: Focus on climate)

On the other hand, scoffing at climate science is popular enough with the party base that many congressional Republicans hesitate to openly challenge the skeptics. One longtime Republican operative explained that even GOP lawmakers’ most extreme statements about climate change “play well” among conservatives.

Still, some Republicans are sounding the alarm.

“It’s dawning on us that we’re going to lose people who are focused on the future — that would be young people — if we continue in this disputing of the science,” said former Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.), who wants his party to support a carbon tax as a more free-market alternative to Obama’s proposed regulations. “We’re going to lose credibility. We’re going to lose the sense that we have anything to offer.”

( WATCH: POLITICO Pro's Future of Energy Briefing - What's Next for 2013)

Republicans who don’t take climate change seriously risk losing support from women and young people, said former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican who headed the Environmental Protection Agency during George W. Bush’s first term. “The American people are beginning to make connections to the things that are happening around them.”

Some polls back up the warnings. A recent one issued by the League of Conservation Voters found that 73 percent of young voters — including 52 percent of young Republicans — would be less likely to support candidates who don’t want to address climate change. Asked to describe climate skeptics, respondents used terms like “ignorant,” “out of touch” and “crazy.”

Climate skepticism also threatens to hurt Republicans among Latinos, said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. He said Hispanics care more about climate change than any other group in the U.S.

Disputing climate science is “a successful individual strategy” for some Republicans in conservative districts, but “it’s a losing national strategy,” Leiserowitz said. “I think chances are they will pay a political price, increasingly so in the future.”

Of course, not all skeptics’ arguments sound alike. Some contend that the Earth isn’t warming, or at least not as fast as Obama would have voters believe — and some even claim it’s getting cooler. Others argue that the rising temperatures may not have human causes, or at least not significantly enough that we can do anything about them. Or they say scientists just don’t know.

( Also on POLITICO: House panel approves deep EPA cuts)

And some contend the extra carbon dioxide is beneficial.

“CO 2 is not something that hurts people’s health,” Rohrabacher said. “If anything, it helps people’s health by making plants grow and making more food available.”

Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions sounded a similar theme on the floor this month when he criticized EPA’s decision to treat carbon dioxide — or as he called it, “plant food” — as a pollutant.

During a House Science, Space and Technology Committee hearing in June, Rohrabacher also asserted that the recent discovery of a ship wrecked in a large storm a century ago in the Great Lakes shows that extreme weather has always existed. “It was interesting that we had such a massive storm in 1910, which indicates that we are not now going through massive storms that are any different than massive storms that we had in the past,” he said.

At an April hearing, Barton suggested going even further back — to the days of Noah.

“If you’re a believer in the Bible, one would have to say the Great Flood is an example of climate change,” Barton said. “And that certainly wasn’t because mankind had overdeveloped hydrocarbon energy.”

Barton said he doesn’t deny that the climate is changing but believes there’s “a divergence of evidence” about the cause.

Even the House science panel’s chairman, Lamar Smith (R-Texas), isn’t so sure what role human activity plays in climate change.

“I believe climate change is due to a combination of factors, including natural cycles and human activity. But scientists still don’t know for certain how much each of these factors contributes to the overall climate change that the Earth is experiencing,” Smith said in a statement to POLITICO. He declined a formal interview for this story.

While Inhofe is outspoken in accusing leading climate researchers of falsifying their studies, Vitter’s Republican staff on the Senate environment panel tried to take a pro-science approach to skepticism in a report this month. The report features quotes from Galileo, Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan about the nature of science while contending that past alarms from climate researchers — and more recent ones from Obama — vastly overstated the threat of global warming.

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.) contended in a recent interview with POLITICO that the planet is actually cooling. “What I can say is a lot of the figures that came out in the middle ’90s have proven to be inaccurate in that we’ve had gradual cooling on average since the late ’90s,” he said.

In fact, global temperature data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show that the planet is indeed warming, and that all 10 of the warmest years on record have occurred since 1998. NOAA said in December that globally, 2010 was the warmest year in records going back to 1880.

Inglis argues that Republicans need to come up with constructive ideas or risk being left in the dust.

“If we could start offering a solution, rather than disputing the problem, then we could be ready to compete on the field of ideas,” said Inglis, who now serves as the executive director of the Energy and Enterprise Initiative at George Mason University. “If we want to dispute the problem, then we can’t compete.”

An anonymous writer identifying himself as a conservative House Republican offered similar cautions in a recent op-ed that drew a flurry of media attention.

Some Democrats, meanwhile, are trying to goad Republicans into openly disputing the science of climate change. Science was the main topic of a climate hearing that Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) held this month, while Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) recently challenged Boehner to organize a floor debate on climate science.

Not all Republicans are playing into the Democrats’ hands, though. Some Republicans in Congress accept the scientific consensus that the climate is changing, in large part due to human activity — even if they disagree about how to address the issue.

“We’ve got a responsibility to deal with the issue of emissions, which I believe do have an impact on our planet and on the climate,” Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the top Republican on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, told POLITICO.

But she wouldn’t bite when asked if her colleagues’ skepticism hurts the GOP.

“Far be it from me to suggest that I have all the answers and people who have a different opinion from me don’t have all the answers,” she said.

Erica Martinson contributed to this report.