Largest Wildfire in State History Rages, But Gardner Pledges to Ram Trump’s Climate Science Skeptic onto Supreme Court

Colorado Newsline: “Barrett’s climate change views are disqualifying”

Denver, CO - Colorado is currently battling the state’s worst wildfire on record — just weeks after the former record holder was extinguished — but Senator Cory Gardner is doubling down on his climate-denying record by pledging to support President Trump’s climate science skeptic Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett. 

During her Senate hearing last week, Barrett refused to say she accepted climate change and called it “politically controversial.” Colorado Newsline editor Quentin Young slammed Barrett’s climate skepticism, writing that “Barrett’s primitive grasp of climate science is a flaw beyond the many others that mar her nomination and should be disqualifying.” Young also called on Gardner to oppose Barrett’s nomination if he is actually the environmentalist his election-year ads claim. But to no surprise, Gardner is still siding with his party bosses. 

Earlier this month, HuffPost unearthed a 2017 interview in which Gardner, like Barrett, repeatedly refused to say if humans cause climate change despite it being long settled science. 

In addition to putting the Affordable Care Act and reproductive freedoms in jeopardy, Gardner’s support for Trump’s Supreme Court nominee puts the country’s efforts to combat climate change and ensure clean air and water at further risk. 

See highlights from the Colorado Newsline’s column below or the full article HERE.

Colorado Newsline: Barrett’s climate change views are disqualifying
Judge’s primitive grasp of climate science poses danger
By Quenten Young | October 17, 2020

• Climate change is “a very contentious matter of public debate,” she asserted. “I will not express a view on a matter of public policy, especially one that is politically controversial.”
  
• Her views on the warming planet are much less discussed. But Barrett’s primitive grasp of climate science is a flaw beyond the many others that mar her nomination and should be disqualifying. . .But it is intolerable for a justice, whose whole job is to weigh the facts of a case against the law, to reject the most significant fact to which humanity must respond.

• The driver behind the increase in Colorado wildfire activity is no mystery. It’s climate change. No serious person disputes this.
  
• Climate change is not a “matter of public debate.” It is an urgent threat to the lives and livelihoods of every Coloradan. This is a fact.
  
• Sen. Cory Gardner has faced criticism for his apparent disdain for action on climate change and his reliability as a friend of the fossil fuel industry. As his first term in office comes to a close, he has made efforts to appear more concerned with the environment, such as the way he championed the Great American Outdoors Act. If his position on climate change has at all evolved, he will vote against Barrett’s confirmation, if only to protest her climate change denialism. There’s no expectation that Gardner is capable of taking such a principled stance, but a vote to confirm a climate change denier to the Supreme Court will also confirm that whatever environmentalism he espouses is little more than campaign posturing.

• No person who rejects the scientific reality of human-caused climate change is fit for public office of any kind... The court next year will hear a case in which Baltimore is suing oil companies for damages due to climate change. Other climate change-related cases will reach the court. A conservative majority could seek to overturn Massachusetts v. EPA, which with a 5-4 decision assigned responsibility for regulating greenhouse gas emissions to the Environmental Protection Agency. 

• The court will not be competent to decide such cases if justices are immune to the life-and-death facts of climate change. Coloradans need only look out their windows to understand that climate change is all too real.