“I ask the chair, you know what this is? It’s a snowball, just from outside here. So it’s very, very cold out. Very unseasonal,” James Inhofe, Republican senator from Oklahoma, said shortly before he infamously threw a snowball in the Senate Chamber (as reported by Slate in February 2015). Inhofe’s performance that day was in the context of a heated global warming debate that had been raging on the Senate floor. Inhofe argued that the science was not conclusive on global warming, and suggested that snow was proof of just that.
If only he had known that uncommon weather patterns, including increased winter precipitation, are a sign of global temperature increase, according to the National Wildlife Federation. But the debate over global warming has never really been a debate about the science, although both sides argue that it is. Instead, this debate is a policy one; the two sides differ with respect to their ideological position on environmental regulation, and global warming has become a proxy for that war. The battles are fought on specific federal policies concerning carbon emissions, whether they be international treaties, carbon taxes, or departmental regulations. Although scientific data is utilized in these debates, it only serves as a tool of the discussion, not as the main focus, as we shall see.
Republicans are actually divided on whether or not global warming is even happening at all. In the 2016 presidential election, for example, New Jersey governor Chris Christie said that he does think, “global warming is real… And I do think human activity contributes to it,” while Ted Cruz claimed, “the global warming alarmists are the equivalent of flat-Earthers” (as reported by CBS News in September 2015). Where they are in agreement, however, along with the rest of their party, is in their overall opposition to the regulations that have been recommended to combat climate change. The 2016 GOP platform opposed most of President Obama’s actions to combat it, and instead claimed that environmental problems are best faced by, “incentives for human ingenuity … not through top-down, command-and-control regulations” (as reported by Los Angeles Times in July 2016).
Democrats, by contrast, are largely in agreement that global warming exists, is affected to a notable degree by human activity, and should be addressed through federal regulation. Going back to the 2016 election, the two frontrunners for the Democratic party election, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders “ … laid out aggressive plans to reduce carbon emissions that make President Obama’s initiatives look tame” (Time magazine, April 2016). They differed a bit on specifics, but a basic trust in science, as well as their support of federal measures designed to support its conclusions, could be found at the heart of both candidates’ plans. The Democratic platform, crafted once the primary season was over, called on the federal government to take drastic steps toward fighting climate change, such as moving to 50% renewable energy in one decade’s time.
As shown in Senator Inhofe’s speech, this debate is not a scientific one. Rather, this debate is perspective-driven, with the two sides disagreeing on what role the federal government should play in combating environmental issues more broadly. Science serves as a sort of cloak to further the agendas at work. Ideology is the wolf under that cloak.