In a less insane world, Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio’s views on climate change would be enough to scrub them right out of the race for the Republican presidential nomination. But the majority of GOP-affiliated voters in New Hampshire, which holds the nation’s first primary Tuesday, mesh quite nicely with the views of the three candidates.
Jeremy Schulman at Mother Jones writes:
At a campaign stop in Henniker, New Hampshire, last week, Ted Cruz was asked what he'd do as president to combat climate change. Cruz's answer—an eight-minute rant that you can watch [here]—was essentially that he would do nothing. Because global warming isn't happening. It's "the perfect pseudoscientific theory" to justify liberal politicians' quest to expand "government power over the American citizenry," he said.
Like Cruz, the two GOP front-runners in the state—Donald Trump and Marco Rubio—reject mainstream climate science. Trump has repeatedly called global warming a "hoax," and Rubio has said, "I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it." John Kasich, who's been rising in the New Hampshire polls in recent weeks, has made a number of contradictory comments about climate change.
It’s hard to know for certain whether these climate change-denying candidates really believe the nonsense they’re spewing or are just doing so because that’s what they think will get them votes (or campaign contributions).
It hardly matters one way or the other. Because while 55 percent of New Hampshirites overall think humans are causing global warming, according to the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, that is not the case for Republican voters in the state. Convinced by their own scientific illiteracy or by the decades-long propaganda war waged by the Koch brothers, Exxon, and other fossil fuel fools, only 40 percent of party regulars accept the consensus of climate scientists and just 28 percent of tea party Republicans accept it.
Their views get even crazier than that.
One of the questions that Yale asked Granite Staters in a theoretical general election match-up between Donald Trump with Bernie Sanders was whether the level of carbon dioxide has been increasing in the atmosphere, something the data prove is irrefutable. The chart below shows the stunning results: