OPINION:
What do Republicans typically think about global warming? Alarmism is not part of their vocabulary. Climate doom does not register much within the Grand Old Party, where most folks say that humans are not necessarily responsible for increased temperatures or those pesky greenhouses gases. Cows, maybe. Republicans tend to chalk up high temperatures, tough winters and weird winds to prevailing weather patterns that have swept around the planet for many centuries.
Al Gore does not agree.
But of course. Credit is due the former vice president for his devoted tenaciousness about “inconvenient” truths. But here comes the politics. Mr. Gore also says that entrepreneurial brothers Charles and David Koch hold severe sway over the GOP’s opinion of environmental matters. The pair have “cowed” Republicans, to the point that they’re reluctant to speak their minds.
This is what Mr. Gore believes.
Koch Industries, however, have already issued a public statement, noting, “The Kochs are advocates of the critical review that is the foundation of sound science, as everyone interested in furthering discovery should be. Climate science is a complex and ever-changing issue.”
That sounds reasonable enough. Mr. Gore differs.
“There is a enforced orthodoxy in the Republican party,” Mr. Gore told a recent audience at the University of Chicago, explaining that any GOPers who “even breathe the slightest breath of sympathy for the truth about climate science” are chastised.
“I don’t think it’s particularly complicated. They will face primary opponents financed by the Koch brothers and others who are part of their group,” Mr. Gore said, sitting opposite former White House adviser David Axelrod, who moderated the discussion.
“Anyone who wants to set his or her aspirations on the Republican nomination for the presidency in 2016 already knows that they can’t possibly cross the Koch brothers and the others that are part of that group,” Mr. Gore declared.
“They’re large carbon polluters and ideological anti-statists, who are really terrified that the government will do anything new and so as Grover Norquist said so famously years ago, they want to shrink the government to where it can be drowned in a bathtub.”
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