The Associated Press Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, said we live on a cooling planet. The Republican National Committee Chairman, Michael Steele, has weighed in on climate change.
In a March 6 radio appearance that is only now percolating through the blogosphere, Mr. Steele apparently fielded a skeptic’s question about global warming. As transcribed by The Huffington Post, a liberal site, Mr. Steele thanked the questioner and replied this way:
We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I am using my finger quotation marks here, is part of the cooling process. Greenland, which is now covered in ice, it was once called Greenland for a reason, right? Iceland, which is now green. Oh I love this. Like we know what this planet is all about. How long have we been here? How long? No very long.
Mr. Steele -– the originator of the “drill baby drill” slogan that dominated last year’s Republican National Convention — appears to be aligning himself with Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, also a Republican, who has denounced the idea of a global warming catastrophe as “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” and said that many of the Obama administration’s early moves amounted to “environmental thuggery.”
Sen. Representative John Boehner, the Senate House minority leader, has described cap-and-trade as a “carbon tax that increases taxes on all Americans who drive
a car, who have a job, who turn on a light switch.”
Many other Republicans argue that climate change is real and needs to be addressed. Sen. John McCain, the presidential nominee last year, is one of the original architects of a Congressional cap-and-trade bill, though he forcefully opposes the Obama administration’s plan to auction off emissions allowances to polluters (Mr. McCain would prefer to give the initial allowances away free).
Jon Huntsman, the Republican governor of Utah, also favors a cap-and-trade system for limiting carbon emissions, as mentioned in this New York Times profile. So does Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California.
In Washington, however, many say it is not Republicans, but the coal-state Democrats in the Senate, who will decide the fate of any cap-and-trade bill.
Comments are no longer being accepted.