April 18, 2019 03:49 PM UTC

There's Stupid, Then There's Sen. Ray Scott (R)

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Colorado Independent’s Alex Burness reports, while everyone with a college education in Grand Junction (and plenty of students too) hangs their heads in shame:

Climate change has led to “massive improvements” and “the planet is a thing that heals itself,” state Sen. Ray Scott argued Thursday morning.

Scott, a Republican from Grand Junction, was speaking against Senate Bill 96, which would require the state to collect greenhouse gas emissions data from oil and gas wells, coal mines and other sources of planet-warming gases. Reports on emissions would be released annually, which supporters hope would help guide climate change policy.

“I will argue that climate change is occurring, but in the reverse order,” Scott told his colleagues on the Senate floor. “Anybody in this room and I can have a discussion about what was our climate like 100 years ago or 80 years ago or 50 years ago or 20 years ago. We have made massive improvements in our climate. Massive improvements.”

The clip above summarizes Sen. Scott’s singularly idiotic floor speech against Senate Bill 19-096 this morning, which can be most charitably described as a low-information conflation of particulate and other visible forms of air pollution with greenhouse gas emissions responsible for human-caused climate change. Legislation like the Clean Air Act, which Republicans of course vociferously oppose, has indeed led to a reduction in many dangerous forms of air pollution including a lot of the stuff one can see.

But of course we’re talking about the climate, not the “brown cloud”–and unless you’re stoked about the desertification of the Front Range and millions of climate refugees fleeing to high ground like Colorado from flooded coastal cities across the globe, it’s really, really hard to argue that we’re looking at anything you’d call a “massive improvement.”

Don’t spend too much time trying to figure his meaning out. All that matters is Sen. Scott doesn’t have a clue.