More Facts, More Inconvenience, and More Laws For Ignorance

I hope that this is not a trend. As I previously posted, North Carolina is trying to legislate ignorance by requiring that the science of climate change is excluded from studies of sea level rise. Well, it looks like Virginia is following suit with a similar push by that state’s GOP legislators to similarly exclude science from a coastal study in their state.

            The curious thing for me is the manner in which climate change science was characterized by GOP lawmaker Chris Stolle. He called scientific terminology “left wing terms” and “political speech.”

The push to politically isolate environmentalism, which traditionally has always enjoyed broad public support, to a politics of the left goes back at least to the 1980 presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan. Reagan and others characterized environmentalism as left wing and extreme.

            Now in Virginia we have gone to another level. The inconvenient facts, the science that indicates a warming world and rising seas—what concerns environmentalists and is actually a concern for just about everybody else—is now thought of as political, and left leaning political at that. This is big crazy and makes my head spin.