GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum doesn’t mince words when it comes to his energy plan: humanity’s purpose is to dominate the environment.

Speaking at an energy summit in Colorado yesterday, the former Pennsylvania Senator explained his belief that humans were “put on this earth … for our benefit, not for the Earth’s benefit.”

In his speech, Santorum also blamed human-caused global warming — which played a role in making 2011 the most disastrous year ever for extreme weather in America — on the “vagaries of nature.”

“If you leave it to Nature, then Nature will do what Nature does, which is boom and bust. We were put on this Earth as creatures of God to have dominion over the Earth, to use it wisely and steward it wisely, but for our benefit not for the Earth’s benefit.”

“We are the intelligent beings that know how to manage things and through that course of science and discovery if we can be better stewards of this environment, then we should not let the vagaries of nature destroy what we have helped create.”

It’s no surprise that Santorum is a proud global warming denier. More surprising was his call for “science and discovery” to “be better stewards of this environment.” In the same breath, however, Santorum casually swept aside the consensus among 97% of climate scientists actively publishing peer-reviewed research in the field that human activity is warming the planet:

“I for one never bought the hoax. I for one understand just from science that there are one hundred factors that influence the climate. To suggest that one minor factor of which man’s contribution is a minor factor in the minor factor is the determining ingredient in the sauce that affects the entire global warming and cooling is just absurd on its face.

Santorum is a devout Catholic and uses his religious beliefs as a major platform in his candidacy for president. However, his position on global warming is completely opposite that of the Catholic church, which has called for a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions “without delay” in order to protect “the whole of creation.”

Santorum clearly hasn’t read about the physics of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, which he dismissed as a “minor factor.” In fact, the radiative forcing of our CO2 emissions is the equivalent of 1 million Hiroshima nuclear bombs per day in the atmosphere.

“When there’s more energy radiating down on the planet than there is radiating back out to space, something’s going to have to heat up,” explained Mike Sandiford, Director of the Melbourne Energy Institute, in a recent article.

But if Santorum thinks that humans were created with the sole purpose of dominating the earth, no amount of science may be able to shake that belief.

Appearing on NBC’s Meet The Press this Sunday, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich attempted to shift blame away from oil companies for rising gasoline prices. Asked by host David Gregory how he would attack President Obama given positive news about the economy, Gingrich falsely claimed that the Environmental Protection Agency has a plan to “raise the price of gasoline by 25 cents a gallon”:

His policies have consistently, I think, weakened the country. He has an Environmental Protection Agency proposal that would raise the price of gasoline by 25 cents a gallon. There are very few Americans who want to see the price of gasoline raised by government to 25 cents a gallon.

Watch it:

Gingrich’s claim was generated last July by the oil industry’s lobbying arm, the American Petroleum Institute. On behalf of API, oil industry consulting firm Baker & O’Brien analyzed a proposal by the auto industry’s lobbying arm, the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, for “a single national (excluding California) summertime gasoline specification that they referred to as National Clean Gasoline (NCG).”

According to the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, their proposed National Clean Gasoline standard would cost about one to 5 cents per gallon, while cutting smog and other air pollution by 10 to 20 percent. The oil-approved Baker & O’Brien study argued — using a proprietary and opaque methdology — that the proposal “could boost the cost of making gasoline by up to 25 cents per gallon and could shutter up to seven U.S. refineries.”

The EPA has been working on a plan to require cleaner new passenger vehicles and cleaner, low-sulfur gasoline – a move that could cost less than a penny a gallon. Reducing the sulfur content of gasoline would make every catalytic converter on the road today more effective. Every car in America would emit fewer smog-producing emissions. In fact, reducing sulfur is the single quickest and most effective step that EPA could take to reduce smog levels from coast to coast.

In summary, Gingrich’s claim that the EPA has a proposal to raise the price of gasoline by 25 cents a gallon ignores a number of facts. The proposal to which he’s referring came from the auto industry, not the EPA. The charge that the auto industry’s clean-gasoline proposal would increase prices by 25 cents per gallon is based on an oil-industry study that gave costs five times higher than other analyses. The EPA’s actual proposal for cleaner gasoline would have significant health and economic benefits for Americans with minimal effect on gas prices.

(HT Frank O’Donnell)