No good news for climate research from GOP primaries
Climate change won’t be a priority in the next Republican presidential candidate’s electoral agenda, according to the Iowa caucuses outcomes. In the first
round of the GOP primaries, Mitt Romney beat Rick Santorum by only eight votes
in a competition where the two first candidates gained the 50% of the votes and
now they seem to be among the most likely pretenders to challenge Barak Obama.
The Republican voters are supposed to not care about climate issues but Romney and Santorum both defend fossil fuels and are both unlikely to spend too much attention in climate change related politics.
Months ago Mitt Romney started to speak in public about climate change showing a defined perspective and expressing his personal doubt about how much of it is caused by human activities. In October 2011, in a forum in Pennsylvania he said: “My
view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet. And
the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2
emissions is not the right course for us”.
Even more radical and sharp is the opinion of Rick Santorum on climate related topics. Climate change and global warming skepticism have been strong point in the former Pennsylvania GOP senator since his first public speeches as presidential candidate, when he talked about “junk science” referring to climate research on global warming and defined climate change as a “liberal conspiracy”, according to the English newspaper The Guardian.