US taxpayers on the hook for Senator Inhofe's conspiracy theories [2]
Much like trusting your mechanic when he says you need new brakes or a doctor when he tells you that your cholesterol is too high, you would hope that elected officials would listen to the experts in a particular field when it comes to developing common sense government policies.
On the issue of global warming, that is happening now for the vast majority of the world’s leaders and their political colleagues. Even former US president George W. Bush came to be convinced of the need to action on global warming. Pretty hard not to be when you consider the mountains of evidence produced, tested and re-tested by scientists at top institutes like NASA, the Royal Society and the American Academy of Sciences.
And President Obama needs no convincing, nor does his Energy Secretary Steven Chu. Today, the Nobel-prize winning Chu said that, [7] “California could lose all its agriculture by the end of the century, and that a number of its cities are also in peril due to worsening global warming.”
The Los Angeles Times reported that Chu said the state’s award-winning vineyards, as well its farms, could be wiped out in the starkest warning yet from the Obama administration.
This is where the waste of taxpayer’s dollars comes in in the form of Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) who continues to spend his days ignoring the expertise of the best in the field and grasping onto a delusion that he and his handful of conspiracy theorists are somehow “winning,” [8] as if science is a high school popularity contest.
Inhofe’s response to Chu’s concern over California’s water issues was:
Real world data? New studies? You would think that Chu would have heard of such things given his career as a scientist. Looking for evidence of this “real world data” I took a look through Inhofe’s blog on the Environment and Public Works website, [9] run by his political assistant Marc Morano. [10]
Far from being a source of data, Inhofe’s blog serves as a wonderful chronology of delusion. You also get a good idea of just how much time (and money) Inhofe’s office is dumping into this effort to fulfill Inhofe’s foregone conclusion that global warming is nothing more than a giant conspiracy. [8]
I’m interested in whether the American public is okay with their taxpayer money going into this claptrap? In particular, I am wondering how people in California feel about a taxpayer sponsored effort to obscure the realities of global warming, which scientists are saying will have devastating effects on their very livelihood in the near future.
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