An analysis shows that American politics is an outlier when it comes to climate denial. Nearly one in four members of Congress deny the reality of climate change, while the American public is growing concerned about dangerous global warming.
A total of 123 elected federal representatives – 100 in the House of Representatives and 23 U.S. senators – deny the existence of man-made climate change. All of them are Republicans, according to a recent survey of statements by current members.
“It’s certainly concerning,” said Kat So, campaign director for energy and environmental campaigns at the Center for American Progress, who wrote the report.
The report defines climate deniers as people who claim that the climate crisis is not real or not primarily human-caused, or who claim that climate science is not settled, that extreme weather is not caused by global warming, or that pollution that causes global warming is beneficial.
Examples of denial by representatives are also highlighted.
“Of course the climate is changing,” Texas Senator Ted Cruz said in 2018. “The climate has been changing since the beginning of time. The climate will change as long as we have a planet Earth.”
Other cases are more recent.
“We had freezes in the ’70s. They said it was going to be another cooling period,” Florida Rep. Steve Scalise said in a 2021 interview, citing long-debunked research still often cited by climate deniers. “And now it’s getting warmer and colder, and it’s Mother Nature. But the idea that hurricanes or wildfires have only happened in the last few years is just a fallacy.”
Climate-denying lawmakers have received a total of $52 million in campaign donations from the fossil fuel industry, the report also found.
The research shows that, perhaps uniquely among people in developed countries, the American public is disproportionately represented by climate deniers. While 23% of the entire U.S. Congress is made up of people who deny the climate crisis, polls show that the percentage of Americans who share this view is considerably smaller, at a whopping half.
While a quarter of US lawmakers deny the climate crisis, the American public is moving significantly in the other direction. Fewer than one in five people in the US reject the findings of climate science, according to several studies, with long-running polls from Yale University showing that those they classify as “dismissive” make up just 11%.
While this segment of the American public has remained largely unchanged in recent years, a much larger and growing group is concerned about the climate crisis after a series of record-breaking hot years and a series of wildfires, storms and other climate-related events. More than half of Americans are now “alarmed” or “concerned” about climate change, the Yale polls found.
“The number of people on both ends of the spectrum — alarmed and dismissive — was essentially equal in 2013, but today there are three alarmed people for every one dismissive one, so there has been a fundamental change in the way people see climate change in the U.S.,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, a climate public opinion expert at Yale.
While the number of lawmakers who deny the climate crisis is staggering, it has been steadily declining in recent years. Just five years ago, 150 lawmakers denied the crisis. But many elected officials who do not deny the crisis still use anti-climate rhetoric and work to block policies to limit greenhouse gases.
Florida Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, for example, has previously used the language of climate denial, but recently described climate change as “more of a religion” — another form of “climate obstruction,” the report said. He also remains opposed to climate aid.
“There are a lot of harmful ways to talk about and act on climate,” So said. “Just because they accept the scientific findings or say they believe in climate change, doesn’t mean they’re not going to stop obstructing climate action or using rhetoric that’s anti-climate action.”
Naomi Oreskes, a professor of the history of science at Harvard University who has long studied anti-climate rhetoric, said it was “not surprising” that the report showed that old-fashioned climate denial is on the decline.
“It’s harder to deny the science when it’s much clearer that the climate is warming, that extreme weather is getting worse and happening all the time,” she said. “No one can deny the science with a straight face, given everything.”
However, she noted that the fossil fuel industry and its allies have long used different messages to debunk climate concerns, and she said she wasn’t sure whether those other forms of rhetoric were any less damaging.
“Back in the 90s, they were saying renewable energy wasn’t reliable enough, or wind energy … kills whales,” she said. “Is it really that different from climate denial if you’re not denying the science, but you’re denying the possibility of solutions?”
Leiserowitz said that among ordinary people, the views of the relatively small group of people who deny that temperatures are rising or who link climate science to conspiracy theories about Al Gore or the United Nations are often exaggerated, both politically and in American society as a whole.
“This small minority of Americans is really vocal, they vote more often and they are clearly more than adequately represented in the halls of Congress,” he said.
“They’re punching above their weight and having an undue influence on the public sphere, to the point where most people don’t want to talk about climate change because they think half the country doesn’t believe in it. There’s a culture of silence — climate has become, along with sex, religion and politics, the topics that aren’t allowed to be discussed at the Thanksgiving table.”
Political polarization and the prevalence of “safe” congressional seats, which encourage candidates to adopt more extreme positions in order to secure key party primaries, have helped perpetuate this imbalance, Leiserowitz said, along with a flood of donations from the fossil fuel industry.