Rick Perry: "Dancing with Denial"

"Rick Perry has danced his way back into the climate denial camp. At his Senate confirmation hearing earlier this year, the secretary of energy admitted that the climate is changing and that 'some of it is caused by man-made activity.'

Many wondered if Perry had a change of heart on climate change. For more than a decade as Texas governor, Perry had been an ardent climate denier. He argued that calling carbon dioxide a pollutant was 'a disservice to the country' and claimed that climate scientists 'have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.' In his 2010 anti-federal screed Fed Up!, he claimed the Earth was experiencing 'a cooling trend' and called climate science 'all one contrived phony mess.'

Perry was so vociferous in his criticism of climate science that he once noted — perhaps in an attempt to distance himself from his past involvement with Al Gore’s 1988 presidential campaign — that Gore’s 'mouth is the leading source of all that supposedly deadly carbon dioxide' and called him 'a false prophet of a secular carbon cult.'"

Naveena Sadasivam reports for the Texas Observer July 19, 2017.