I posted the above vid about a year ago. Although Carly Fiorina is now considered the cutting edge at the frontiers of climate denial rhetoric, a year ago it was Jindal. I wrote:
Governor Bobbie Jindal, a possible presidential nominee, gives a demonstration of the current state of science denial in right wing America.
A nice example of what we can expect in the coming political season.
Obama was visiting New Orleans on Thursday to mark 10 years after the disaster.
The letter from Jindal, dated Wednesday, read:
While you and others may be of the opinion that we can legislate away hurricanes with higher taxes, business regulations and EPA power grabs, that is not a view shared by many Louisianians.I would ask you to respect this important time of remembrance by not inserting the divisive political agenda of liberal environmental activism.
Furthermore, the people of Louisiana have already agreed upon a pragmatic and bipartisan approach to preventing and mitigating the damage of future weather systems.
Jindal, who was a congressman during the storm, wrote a “lecture on climate change” would not improve New Orleans — something residents did themselves.
“It would distract from the losses we have suffered, diminish the restoration efforts we have made, and overshadow the miracle that has been the Louisiana comeback,” he wrote.
Wonkette a year ago:
In a bravura performance of the “I Know You Are but What Am I” suite today, Louisiana Gov. Bobby “Volcano Monitoring Is Dumb” Jindal attacked the Obama administration for being a big bunch of “science deniers” who don’t have the good sense to drill for oil everywhere and get all the oil and coal and burn it up quick quick for prosperity, and so we’re all going to die in the cold and the wolves will get us. We’re summarizing a little, there.
At a breakfast panel of potential 2016 Republican candidates sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, the exorcism enthusiast and creationism enabler explained:
The reality is, right now, we’ve got an administration — the Obama administration — that are science deniers when it comes to harnessing America’s energy resources and the potential to create good-paying jobs.
Jindal then went on to outline his own very special energy plan, which bears the Luntzian title “Organizing Around Abundance: Making America an Energy Superpower.” The completely unique plan, which is unlike any other and is Bobby Jindal’s alone, calls for building the Keystone XL pipeline, pursuing “responsible development of domestic energy resources,” and only working to address climate change if all other countries agree.
President Barack Obama commemorated the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina on Thursday in New Orleans with a speech that made special mention of building resilience against climate change, despite earlier criticism by the state’s conservative governor for his planned remarks.
“We are going to see more extreme weather events as a result of climate change — deeper droughts, deadlier wildfires, stronger storms,” Obama said, adding that the government has been preparing for the change by investing in stronger levies, as well as restoring wetlands and other natural systems that are critical for storm protection.
Hurricane Katrina, which struck the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, 2005, unleashed floods that killed nearly 2,000 people, left thousands of others homeless and caused an estimated $250 billion in damage. It was the costliest and most damaging storm in U.S. history.
Prior to Obama’s speech, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a long-shot Republican presidential candidate who has expressed doubt about man-made climate change, told the president in a letter to reconsider his message.
The anniversary, Jindal wrote, is a time to mourn the dead, not bring up a topic that’s part of the “divisive political agenda of liberal environmental activism.”
Another Mass Shooting, during a live TV report, took place in America yesterday. So Bobby Jindal advised the President to avoid “inserting the divisive political agenda of liberal gun control activism” under the GOP truism that not talking about why things happen magically makes them go away.
Homicides by firearms are going down in the USA, keep doing whatever you’re doing
http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/08/graphics-americas-guns
If you want to be a billionaire, you should invent a weapon that will let the Yankees kill each other faster.
I know I’m paraphrasing that. But it’s still as true about today’s Europeans as it was a century and a bit ago…
Typical brainless right wing blah, blah, blah. Homicides are going down because crime is going down. According to Freakonomics it was due to the legalizing of abortion. Unwanted children have a tendency to turn into criminals. Your right wing buddies are trying to reverse this.
This is happening all over the Western World. However, gun deaths in the US are head and shoulders above everywhere else in the world.
Also lead was removed from gasoline. Lead poisoning was epidemic in inner city neighborhoods. Less lead, less crime.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/watchdog/ct-lead-poisoning-science-met-20150605-story.html
Having more guns had nothing to do with it, except in idiot land.
I agree on the lead removal hypothesis. Btw the Economist ain’t right wing, by a long shot.
Actually,the source of most of the lead that caused the real problems was in the paint in the inner-city slums, and many inner city residents sued their landlords and won big settlements over that. No “hypothesis” at all. Some children ingested so much lead that they were impaired for life.
Of course, Omnomoron thinks gasoline was the source of the physical and mental impairments—-guess those kids washed down the paint chips with high test.
You don’t drink gas to get lead (when leaded gas was used), you just have to breath. Paint chips from old leaded paint was also a major source. Of course, in BOTH cases, the right wing and industry said it was too expensive to get the lead out and would kill our cars and paint would go all moldy. Gee we seemed to have survived their dire predictions. The same story was true about almost every environmental and health initiative and is true today.
story of industrial lead here, has resonance to climate denial
story of industrial lead has resonance for climate denial
True, and it has resonance to racism as well.
Building resilience, that’s adaptation, far less politically poisonous than mitigation.
And I’d rather talk climate change in New Orleans, Katrina was supposed to be the new normal, and it hasn’t been.
You mean crazy weather isn’t the “new normal”? Evidently you live in a different world than I do. What color is the sky in your world?
New normal was a lot more hurricanes until it wasn’t
You are being extremely uncharitable here. The prediction that hurricanes would become more powerful and more frequent (did anyone actually say that?) was the correct call- based on the increased energy and water content of the atmosphere. And on documented observation of increased wind speeds, increased sustained winds, and increased northern migration of hurricanes.
The fact that we have not seen more hurricanes hitting the U.S. lately is either mere serendipity, or more importantly, because of the very bizarre and very recent changes in weather patterns, ocean currents, ocean temperatures, Antarctic and Arctic melting, and barometric anomalies like the Ridiculously Resilient Ridge.
All of which are due to AGW. All of which are emergent phenomena and therefore unpredictable.
And all of which you knew. Which makes your sniping and carping not just uncharitable, but hypocritical and intellectually dishonest. All, unfortunately, par for the course for you.
lack of US landfall hurricanes does not mean no hurricanes. They have been forming in near-normal numbers but spinning away in the Atlantic. I’ve spoken to Kerry Emanuel at MIT, who tells me his index of hurricane power is increasing in the north atlantic. I believe he is saying the pacific shows a similar but less clear increase.
The problem of course is not the science but the people trying to abuse it for political purposes. In the Katrina case far too many tried to make the point that climate change would mean more death and destruction by hurricanes. As we know, Atlantic seasons have been a long series of duds since, and not just regarding canes hitting the US.
Science in the meantime has progressed to the point that everybody agrees El Nino years will see wind shear destroy most Atlantic systems.
The question now should be, in what aspects of weather and climate are we being alarmed now, as incorrectly as in 2005 regarding hurricanes?
But am sure nobody else here will dare. Onwards and forwards then, with countless posts saying Republicans are so evil they ought be stripped of the right to vote.
Unfortunately the US electoral cycle means that same kind of post is repeated ad nauseam. Maybe Peter could just point us to the blogs of 2013, 2011, etc etc. My forecast is for climate change to be proclaimed the defining issue for the Presidential election around Feb 2016.
Leave it to Omno to pluck uninformed and puerile OPINION out of his butt and try to make something of it. He is too freaking lazy (and likely too dumb) to take advantage of the research and opinions of those like Emanuel who ARE working to understand how AGW and hurricanes interact. An interesting piece on U.S. hurricanes going back 2000 years.
http://www.whoi.edu/news-release/prehistoric-hurricanes
I wonder what Omno will say when the hurricanes DO start arriving with greater frequency and intensity as predicted. His comments here are akin to Strom Inhofe saying “How can there be global warming when there’s snow on the ground?”
Jindal is the perfect representative of the new Republican Party, the new “Know Nothing” party that treasures ideology over facts and science. Like the Know Nothing party of old, they reject whatever does not fir their agenda and worldview. Get real Repubs, avoiding the issue does not avoid the consequences. In fact, more delay just forces more of what you really want to avoid, greater and more draconian regulations and increased need for Governmental action, to be even more necessary and the results even more expensive than addressing it now. The sooner we take real actions, the less costly it will be. Right now, there is a better than even changes that the net cost of real action will be either very small or an actual plus to our economy.
Jindal:
“While you and others may be of the opinion that we can legislate away hurricanes with higher taxes, business regulations and EPA power grabs, that is not a view shared by many Louisianians”
Stupid Democrats don’t realize that the way to legislate away hurricanes is to pass State laws which forbid the use of the term ‘hurricanes” in State reports. Hey, it works for “Sea Level Rise”, right?
I hope that at least some of the climate deniers in public power positions, actually believe what they assert, simply because if they don’t, that means that we have a ruling class of sociopathic monsters that are willing to sacrifice, willingly, the futures of millions of people who will be coming of age during a period of growing dangers and catastrophic events that will entail chaos, great hardships, and early deaths of those who had no choice in the matter, but were mere victims of either an ignorant, or pathologically uncaring, self-serving, base animals.
Bobby (self-named—his real first name is Piyush) Jindal is a joke everywhere but in his home state. I fell out of my chair laughing when he gave the response to the State of the Union address and was touted as a “possible” Repugnant Party presidential candidate.
A very smart man with much education who has somehow deluded himself into thinking he could be president and has sold out to the right wing and fossil fuel interests in order to gain their support.
Louisiana is at ground zero for the negative effects of AGW and sea level rise, and it is the ultimate irony that Jindal should be writing letters talking about the “divisive political agenda of liberal environmental activism.” Is he crazy? Are all the Republicans crazy? Or are they infected with Wetiko disease?