US politics is an outlier bastion of climate denial with nearly one in four members of Congress dismissing the reality of climate change, even as alarm has grown among the American public over dangerous global heating, an analysis has found.
A total of 123 elected federal representatives – 100 in the House of Representatives and 23 US senators – deny the existence of human-caused climate change, all of them Republicans, according to a recent study of statements made by current members.
“It’s definitely concerning,” said Kat So, campaign manager for energy and environment campaigns at the Center for American Progress, who wrote the report.
The report defined climate deniers as those who say that the climate crisis is not real or not primarily caused by humans, or claim that climate science is not settled, that extreme weather is not caused by global warming or that planet-warming pollution is beneficial.
It also highlights examples of denial from representatives.
“Of course the climate is changing,” the Texas senator Ted Cruz said in 2018. “The climate has been changing from the dawn of time. The climate will change as long as we have a planet Earth.”
Other instances are more recent.
“We’ve had freezing periods in the 1970s. They said it was going to be a new cooling period,” the Florida representative Steve Scalise said in a 2021 interview, referencing long-debunked research that is often still cited by climate deniers. “And now it gets warmer and gets colder, and that’s called Mother Nature. But the idea that hurricanes or wildfires were caused just in the last few years is just fallacy.”
Climate-denying lawmakers have received a combined $52m in lifetime campaign donations from the fossil fuel industry, the report also found.
The research shows that the American public, perhaps uniquely among people in developed countries, is represented disproportionately by climate deniers. Although 23% of the entire US Congress is composed of those who dismiss the climate crisis, polls show the proportion of Americans who share this view is significantly smaller, by as much as half.
Even as a quarter of US lawmakers deny the climate crisis, the American public has been moving significantly in the other direction. Fewer than one in five people in the US reject the findings of climate science, according to various studies, with long-running polling by Yale University showing that those they class as “dismissive” stand at just 11%.
While this slice of the American public opinion has remained largely unchanged in recent years, a much larger, growing cohort is worried about the climate crisis following a string of record hot years and a parade of wildfires, storms and other climate-fueled events. More than half of Americans are now “alarmed” or “concerned” about climate change, the Yale surveys find.
“The amount of people at each end of the spectrum – alarmed and dismissive – were essentially tied back in 2013 but today there are three alarmed people for every one dismissive, so there’s been a fundamental shift in how people see climate change in the US,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, an expert in climate public opinion at Yale.
Though the portion of lawmakers who deny the climate crisis is stunning, it has been steadily declining in recent years. Just five years ago, 150 lawmakers denied the crisis. But many elected officials who don’t deny the crisis still use anti-climate rhetoric and work to thwart greenhouse gas curbing policies.
The Florida representative Mario Diaz-Balart, for instance, previously used the language of climate denial, but more recently described climate change as being “more of a religion” – a different form of “climate obstruction”, the report says. He has also continued to oppose climate aid.
“There are lots of harmful ways to talk about climate and act on it,” said So. “Just because they accept the scientific findings or say they believe in climate change doesn’t mean that they are not still obstructing climate action, or using rhetoric that is antithetical to climate action.”
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Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard University who has long studied anti-climate rhetoric, said it was “unsurprising” that the report found old-school climate denial is on the decline.
“It’s harder to deny the science when it’s so much more apparent that the climate is warming, that extreme weather is getting worse and happening constantly,” she said. “Nobody can deny the science with a straight face, given everything.”
She noted, however, that the fossil fuel industry and its allies have long used a variety of messaging to rebuff concerns about the climate. She said she was unsure those other forms of rhetoric were any less harmful.
“As far back as the 1990s, they were saying renewable energy isn’t reliable enough, or they were saying that wind power … kills whales,” she said. “Is it really so different from climate denial if you don’t deny the science but you deny the possibility of solutions?”
Among ordinary people, Leiserowitz said the views of the relatively small group of people who deny that temperatures are warming, or tie climate science to conspiracy theories involving Al Gore or the United Nations, are often exaggerated both politically and throughout US society.
“This small minority of Americans are really vocal, they are more likely to vote and clearly they are more than adequately represented in the halls of Congress,” he said.
“They are punching above their weight and having an undue influence on the public square, to the extent that most people don’t want to talk about climate change because they think half of the country doesn’t believe in it. There’s a culture of silence – climate has joined sex, religion and politics as the topics not to bring up at the Thanksgiving table.”
Political polarization and the prevalence of “safe” congressional seats, which encourage candidates to hew to more extreme views in order to secure key party primary contests, have helped entrench this imbalance, Leiserowitz said, along with a flood of donations from the fossil fuel industry.