Rep. Lenar Whitney, a Republican congressional candidate from Louisiana, called climate change “the greatest deception in the history of mankind” in a new campaign ad and urged fellow Americans to test the issue with a thermometer.
Whitney also blamed former Vice President Al Gore and other Democrats for advancing the idea of man-made climate change.
“A specter is haunting America. It is perhaps the greatest deception in the history of mankind,” Whitney said in the video. She is running for Congress in Louisiana’s 6th Congressional District.
“The conspiracy of global warming has had a devastating effect on the American dream,” she added.
Denying the existence of climate change has become an increasingly common position for conservatives. The Texas Republican Party recently urged the government on all levels to ignore pleas for money to fund global climate change initiatives. Additionally, all of the candidates at a Republican Senate debate in North Carolina earlier this year said they didn’t believe that climate change was real.
Whitney previously called global warming a “hoax” when she announced her candidacy for Congress. Instead of trying to solve problems related to the climate, she says, the country must put resources into settling the country’s $18 trillion in national debt, a problem she calls the “actual apocalyptic event” of modern times.
Whitney mocked Gore’s Inconvenient Truth documentary, which was released almost 10 years ago, saying the Earth “has done nothing but get colder each year since the film’s release.” The movie showcased Gore’s campaign to educate citizens about global warming.
Americans United for Change, a progressive political group, last month called out some Republicans for their denial of climate change. The group labeled each lawmaker in its video as “not a scientist.”
The extreme effects of climate change will continue to worsen if leaders don’t rein in the release of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, according to a recent assessment by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The changes, according to the report, are already affecting people, societies, and ecosystems around the world, from small islands to large continents.
U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell this week said she notices the impact of climate change at most of the national parks she visits. She cited the need for Americans to respond to the changing landscape caused by climate change as one of the critical issues facing the country.
Michele Richinick