At the Western Republican Leadership Conference, a GOP summit held after the CNN-Las Vegas presidential debate, ThinkProgress spoke to a set of lawmakers with a history of targeting public lands for privatization. However, Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) bucked the trend, telling us that she actually has never heard of any “single American” from any party that has called for developing the National Parks.

Lummis seems to be ignoring her own colleague, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), who called for drilling for oil in the Everglades. But Lummis, for whatever reason, claimed that such ideas were completely foreign and unheard of to her:

LUMMIS: I don’t know a single American — Republican, Democrat, Independent, or other — who wants to develop our National Parks. They’re set aside for the enjoyment of the people of this country. And everybody wants to see that unique resource protected.

KEYES: Including the Everglades, for instance?

LUMMIS: The parts that are National Parks in the Everglades, absolutely.

Watch it:

Its not only Bachmann. Rep. Rick Berg (R-ND), while campaigning for Congress last year, called for drilling for oil underneath North Dakota’s Theodore Roosevelt National Park and other federal lands as a scheme to pay for Social Security. Additionally, dozens of Republicans in Congress, including Lummis herself, have cosponsored bills that would severely limit the president’s authority to designate new national monuments. Many of the national parks that Lummis defends so easily started out as national monuments, including Grand Canyon National Park, Joshua Tree National Park, and Zion National Park. Just yesterday President Obama designated his first national monument at Fort Monroe, a historic Civil War site in Virginia.

On Thursday, the House Appropriations Subcommittee for the Interior and Environment approved a slash-and-burn budget for land and environmental agencies. The FY 2012 budget bill includes several riders to prevent the federal government from protecting Americans from global warming pollution. The agencies whose budgets were cut, including the Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Geological Survey, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, and U.S. Forest Service, monitor and respond to flooding, drought, and wildfires.

With hundreds of billions of tons of fossil-fuel greenhouse pollution in the atmosphere, climate disasters are on the rise. The Republican members of the House Appropriations Subcommittee for the Interior and Environment who voted to block interior and environmental agencies from fighting climate change come from districts that are being ravaged by these very disasters:

Subcommittee Chairman Michael K. Simpson (R-ID): Idaho, like much of the nothern United States, has been battered by extreme rains. Presidential Disaster M1987, Flooding, Landslides, and Mudslides

Jerry Lewis (R-CA): San Bernadino County was inundated by extreme rains. Presidential Disaster M1952, Severe Winter Storms, Flooding, and Debris and Mudflows

Ken Calvert (R-CA): Orange County hit by mudslides from extreme rains. Presidential Disaster M1952, Severe Winter Storms, Flooding, and Debris and Mudflows

Steven C. LaTourette (R-OH): On May 26, LaTourette’s district was hit by a tornado. On July 2, power outages from severe storms. On July 6, air quality advisory. With climate change, Asian carp threaten Lake Erie.

Tom Cole (R-OK): Oklahoma is the epicenter of climate disasters in the United States, with death and destruction wrought by blizzards, tornadoes, and extreme drought. Presidential Disaster M1985, Severe Winter Storm and Snowstorm. Presidential Disaster M1989, Severe Storms, Tornadoes, Straight-line Winds, and Flooding, Presidential Emergency EM-3316, Severe Winter Storm. Secretarial Disaster S3080, The combined effects of drought, extreme heat, and high winds.

Jeff Flake, (R-AZ): On July 6, the “dust storm of a lifetime” struck Flake’s district.

Cynthia Lummis (R-WY): Following a grasshopper infestation last year, Montana was struck by flooding rains this spring. Presidential Disaster M1996, Severe Storms and Flooding. Secretarial Disaster S3060, Weather-related grasshopper infestations.

These climate deniers willingly accept federal taxpayer money to support the victims of climate disasters, but are shirking their fiscal and moral responsibility to defend our nation from the pollution that is making these disasters more intense and more frequent. They are letting polluters profit from the suffering of innocent, hard-working Americans and their children. Rep. Mike Simpson (R-ID) says he’s scared of the EPA’s efforts to fight greenhouse pollution. He should be considerably more scared of the consequences of polluting our weather.

By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Public Lands Project, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

America’s national parks are well-loved by Americans of all political leanings due to their immense beauty, function in preserving the past, and their iconic role in our history. But the findings of a new study released yesterday by the National Parks Conservation Association on the State of America’s National Parks show that efforts to protect national parks are more challenging than ever in the face of climate change. Indeed, it is an ironic reality that parks — the natural reserves that we will depend on to help our country and its natural resources adapt to climate change — are themselves threatened by it and other human influences. The addition of climate change to the already-evident stressors of invasive species, industrial development, degraded water, and dirty air will have an unprecedented, compounding effect on national parks, and will severely limit their abilities to bounce back from the impacts that they are already feeling:

Climate change poses a long-term threat to park resources by exacerbating landscape fragmentation and complicating traditional approaches to resource management.

Climate change is a “systemic threat” to the character and appeal of national parks, chipping away at what makes them unique and loved in the first place: glaciers melting in Glacier National Park, Joshua trees disappearing from Joshua Tree National Park, redwoods threatened in Redwood National Park, and the coral reefs surrounding Virgin Islands National Park getting bleached with rising sea temperatures.

A few weeks ago, Think Progress reported on three prominent Republicans speaking out in support of parks, an odd occurrence in an era where public lands are politicized more than ever before. Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), on the influential House Appropriations Committee, noted that fighting for the park service budget is her “number one priority” in advance of the parks’ 100th anniversary in 2016. But Republicans on committees overseeing the national park service continue to deny the very existence of man-made global warming:

- Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), the self-crowned hero of the park service budget: “I believe the jury is still out on whether mankind can alter global climate trends.” [Lummis]

- Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT), Chairman of the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Land: “Despite the fact that scientific data underlying the studies of global warming appear to have been manipulated to produce an intended outcome, EPA officials disregarded the contaminated science, calling it little more than a ‘blip on the history of this process.’”
” [Bishop, 12/08/09]

- Rep. Mike Simpson (R-ID), Chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior and Environment: “While scientists cannot explain the climate changes of the past few decades without including the effects of elevated greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations resulting from the use of fossil fuels, there is widespread disagreement as to the magnitude of human influence on the climate and the degree to which any effort by humanity to reduce carbon output would slow or reverse the effects of climate change.” [Simpson]

- Every GOP member of those subcommittees: The seven GOP members of the Interior and Environment Appropriations subcommittee and the 13 members of the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands all supported H.R. 910 to reverse the scientific endangerment finding that greenhouse pollution threatens the public welfare [Dirty Secrets]

Major cuts have already been made on the National Park Service budget this year, which will keep the agency from being able to address man-made crises that national parks are facing. The Continuing Resolution passed by Republicans to fund the government through September made $11.5 million in cuts to the national park system when compared to FY 2010 levels. The FY 2012 is still in the midst of being worked out in Appropriations Committee, but House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s “roadmap,” passed by the House in April, cut funding to Interior and environment agencies by $2.1 billion. The park system will be underfunded, at a time when they are the most vulnerable to climate change.

Despite the pressure from deniers, the National Park Service is already undertaking efforts to anticipate and adapt to a changing world, such as the Climate Change Response Council, the creation of which Republicans bashed. As National Park Service Director Jon Jarvis said in 2010, “I believe climate change is fundamentally the greatest threat to the integrity of our national parks that we have ever experienced.” And the park service has an important role in the face of climate change, the NPCA report explains:

The National Park Service is in a unique position among federal agencies to communicate to the public both the consequences of climate change and the opportunities to avert some of those consequences by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

As the National Parks Conservation Association noted in its report, “the threats facing America’s national parks are serious and sobering. Our parks are becoming biological lifeboats in a changing and challenging landscape.” We should take this call to action seriously — it’s the only way that our parks will survive.