David Brat, the libertarian college professor thrown in the spotlight by his unlikely defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, unsurprisingly has some shady beliefs about climate change.
In a campaign video, Brat suggested that he's not concerned about global warming, because America will probably be fine. The video was taken down, but Mother Jones transcribed it as follows:
If you let Americans do their thing, there is no scarcity, right? They said we're going to run out of food 200 years ago, that we're goin' to have a ice age. Now we're heating up…Of course we care for the environment, but we're not mad people. Over time, rich countries solve their problems. We get it right. It's not all perfect, but we get it right.
That would put him in the "everyone else can go to hell" camp, right?
That same quote leans heavily on some favorite climate denier rhetoric. Brat, as Chris Mooney points out, appears to be referencing that conservative talking point that won't die -- the argument that, back in the 1970s, scientists were all telling us to fear "global cooling", and so scientists are all hysterical, and we shouldn't listen to anything they say. That, of course has been repeatedly debunked (the short version: it was a fringe theory, and nothing approaching the scientific consensus we have now).
Mother Jones asked Brat's campaign flat-out if he's a climate denier but didn't get a reply; presumably he's still working on his well-crafted response.
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