Tonight on CBS Evening News, each of the 10 leading presidential candidates will be asked, “Do you think the risks of climate change are at all overblown?” According to an advance transcript, every single candidate acknowledges the threat — except Mike Huckabee and Fred Thompson.
Huckabee responds that “scientifically,” he doesn’t know whether global warming is “overblown.” Thompson goes a step further, claiming that the “state of entitlements” and “extremists” who “want to do drastic things to our economy” are the real problems:
THOMPSON: There are a lot of unanswered questions. We don’t know to the extent this is a cyclical thing. This may or may not effect very much. The extremists are the ones who want to do drastic things to our economy before we have more answers as to how much good we can do and whether people in the other parts of the world are going to contribute. It’s the fact that our entitlements are bankrupting the next generation. We’re spending the money of those yet to be born and we can’t continue that way.
Thompson and Huckabee are wrong. The debate is over about whether manmade global warming is a threat. Even members of the Bush White House have admitted so.
It’s unclear how committed to fighting global warming the other Republican candidates are as well. Al Gore and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA) recently announced that they were convening a bipartisan New Hampshire presidential forum on climate and energy. Yet of the Republicans, only Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) agreed to participate.
Giuliani never even returned calls to the forum organizers. While he admits to CBS that there “is global warming,” his solution is to rely more heavily on U.S. coal reserves. Giuliani has received more than $400,000 from employees of companies in the oil, gas, and energy industries. His law firm, Bracewell and Giuliani, also recently led the lobbying campaign on behalf of the utilities companies against the Senate energy bill.
The Sierra Club has more on the presidential candidates’ commitments to a clean energy future.
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