Virginia’s state legislature recently commissioned a report on the impact of climate change on the state’s shore. But the legislature prohibited the study from using the words “climate change” or “sea level rise,” because, as the sponsor of the study said, these are “liberal code words.”
This comes as North Carolina’s legislature moved to “prohibit government agencies from preparing for the estimated three feet rise in coastal sea levels which a state-appointed science panel has predicted will occur before the end of the current century.”
Tonight on The Rachel Maddow Show, guest host Ezra Klein spoke to Rep. Rush Holt—the only physicist serving in Congress—about this distortion of climate science.
“It’s what happened with tobacco,” said Holt, a New Jersey Democrat, of the efforts to suppress climate science. “The tobacco companies tried to change the language about cancer. They set up a Tobacco Institute as if it was somehow based in science, and all it was was marketing. You know, four out of five doctors smoke our cigarettes or recommend our cigarettes. You know, crap like that. And it was clearly that kind of disinformation that the tobacco industry used to sew doubt about the science.”
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