tea partyers can't believe in global warming since the solution requires international cooperation.
My own eyes show rising ocean levels. They show the Arctic ice cap shrinking. They show massive beach erosion, homes toppling into the sea and meteorological records indicating steadily increasing temperatures. The Earth, our dear little planet, just had the hottest May on record.
It is a stunning thing, when you think about it — GOP conservatives adopting a position of studied ignorance or, to put it more humorously, a version of what Chico Marx said in “Duck Soup”: “Well, who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”
Not so, cries the tea party. Not so, echoes most of the GOP’s potential presidential candidates. The list of deniers includes Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul and Rick Santorum. (“Tell that to a plant, how dangerous carbon dioxide is,” Santorum once said.) It’s not clear where Paul Ryan is on the subject, and while Jeb Bush has conceded that global warming is real, he has hardly been adamant that it’s at least partly manmade.
What possesses the tea party on climate change? Some of it has to do with traditional anti-establishment sentiment. If the elite say it’s getting hot, then it must be getting cold. Mostly, though, their position is rooted in a raging antipathy toward (hiss!) big government. Climate change is hardly a local problem. Strictly speaking, it isn’t even a national problem. (China and India are now major polluters.) It will take national and international agreements to deal with global warming and tea party types would rather — almost literally — burn in a kind of hell than submit to Washington or, God forbid, the United Nations.
http://bismarcktribune.com/news/columnists/believing-what-your-own-eyes-should-tell-you/article_393d10a0-0331-11e4-86cf-0019bb2963f4.html
Tea partyers have two reasons to deny climate change. Big money republicans know that dealing with it will cost them money and profits. Libertarians know that dealing with it will require an element of "big government" and even international cooperation - possibly led by the despised (in their eyes) United Nations.
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