Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene fused Christian nationalism with climate denial during a House subcommittee hearing Tuesday. The hearing of the House Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency — chaired by the representative from Georgia and titled “Playing God With The Weather — A Disastrous Forecast” — had a distinctly religious tone from the jump. From the representative who brought you the “Jewish space lasers” conspiracy theory, Greene’s hearing provided a platform for her to peddle unfounded claims about nefarious government-backed efforts “to help these people play God with the weather” and discredit their oh-so-scary climate change agenda.
Here’s how she kicked it off, to give you a taste:
Humans have been trying to control the weather for centuries. Native American tribes performed ceremonial dances to summon rain during droughts. The Mayans sacrificed humans to their rain god. Today, people are still trying to control the weather. But some things have changed. Modern attempts at weather control don’t appeal to divinity. Instead, they use technology to put chemicals in the sky.
As Politico notes, the hearing was dominated by conspiracy theories from Greene and some of her GOP colleagues. An ABC News analysis laid out how Greene embellished or completely misstated facts about real climate-focused technologies and research, such as cloud seeding and greenhouse gas removal. The representative railed against advocates of “geoengineering” and alleged “they want to control the Earth’s climate to address the fake climate change hoax and head off global warming.” She denounced efforts to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and said science “will never be able to capture all of God’s wonderful creations and nature’s mysteries.”
Climate change is, of course, not a hoax, and it’s certainly a choice to frame efforts to avoid its catastrophic impacts as an affront to God. But Greene brought more than a little Bible-thumping to this transparent attempt to spook Americans about and sow distrust in those efforts.
“Do we believe in God, and that he has dominion over his perfect creation of planet Earth? Do we believe that he has given us everything that we need to survive as a civilization since the beginning of time?” Greene asked. “Or do you believe in man’s claim of authority over the weather based on scientists that have only been alive for decades?” It was wild to hear Dark Age conspiracy theories bubbling from the chambers of Congress. President Donald Trump, his vice president and the MAGA movement broadly have advocated for Christian nationalists like Greene to wield more control over the U.S. government. At Tuesday’s hearing, unabashed anti-intellectualism in the guise of sanctimonious spirituality showed how that puts all of America at risk.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.
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