Johnson brings record of climate skepticism to Speakership - The Hill
Johnson brings record of climate skepticism to Speakership | The Hill
Johnson secured the Speakership Wednesday after several weeks of chaos, during which the House voted to remove Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.), Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.) all failed to secure a majority.
Johnson, whose district includes the onetime oil-industry hub of Shreveport, scored a 100% rating from the American Energy Alliance in 2022, along with every other Republican in Louisiana’s House delegation.
In 2017, speaking at a town hall, Johnson seemingly denied the existence of human-caused climate change, saying “The climate is changing, but the question is, is it being caused by natural cycles over the span of the Earth’s history? Or is it changing because we drive SUVs? I don’t believe in the latter. I don’t think that’s the primary driver.”
House Republican leadership has not made climate change a priority and launched numerous attacks on the Biden administration’s energy policies, but the level of outright skepticism in Johnson’s 2017 remarks is less common.
Read more in a full report at TheHill.com.
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.