BY BRIAN MERCHANT
Over the last four years, Congress developed a reputation for institutionalizing an “anti-science” attitude. During the 112th and 113th Congresses, the label was typically applied to its Republicans, who controlled the House of Representatives, and typically because of their propensity to dismiss climate change science. Typically, but not only—misinformed musings about women’s reproductive processes, support for creationist education, attempts to remove the peer review process at the National Science Foundation, and efforts to roll back funding for research programs also ignited the ire of the science-loving public.
It’s climate change that figures most prominently, though. An incredible consensus of scientists—97 percent of climatologists working in the field, according to one peer-reviewed survey—agree that greenhouse gas emissions produced by humans are warming the globe. A significant majority of congressional Republicans have consistently disagreed, and, succumbing to genuine scientific ignorance or mere political expedience, have vocally denied the science outright. Some ventured to call climate change a hoax, others falsely and repeatedly claimed the science simply wasn’t settled.
In 2010, political historian and journalist Ronald Brownstein noted that “it is difficult to identify another major political party in any democracy as thoroughly dismissive of climate science as is the GOP here.” Eileen Claussen, then the president of the Pew Center for Global Climate Change, told Brownstein that there is "no party-wide view like this anywhere in the world that I am aware of." (Now, some contenders may have emerged.) The House grew so hostile to climate science and environmental regulations that Democrats drew up a report, backed with a mountain of vote-count evidence, to try to demonstrate that Republicans were leading “The Most Anti-Environment House in the History of Congress.”
But until 2015, Republicans only controlled the House. The Democratic Party’s slim majority in the Senate served as a check on its climate change-dismissing twin. While the science-challenged House succeeded in blocking any significant legislative efforts to reduce US carbon emissions, that was essentially all it did: lock President Obama’s environmental agenda in a stalemate.
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