Of Course Trump Chose a Global Warming Denier as His Energy Adviser

Donald Trump has announced his new energy adviser: Rep. Kevin Cramer (R–North Dakota). 

I hope you’re sitting down for this shocker: Cramer is a global warming denier. And to be clear, he’s not just a denier. He’s a crackpot.

First, watch this video put together by the folks here at Slate to get an overview of this guy’s view on science:

Trump’s grave misunderstanding of the difference between weather and climate doesn’t surprise me; he’s a buffoon when it comes to such topics (case in point: he said global warming is a hoax manufactured by the Chinese). Given his history, his choice of a crackpot for energy adviser isn’t terribly surprising.

Cramer has a long record of climate change denial (apropos of nothing, over his career Cramer has received more than a half million bucks in funding from the fossil fuel industry, more than twice as much as any other industry). That’s also not surprising given that North Dakota is one of the largest producers of oil and coal in the nation. The burning of excess natural gas fracked in the state is so intense it’s easily visible to satellites in space. Given all that, Cramer denying climate change is de rigeur.

It’s the degree (so to speak) to which he denies it that’s staggering. He’s part of the tiny, tiny head-in-the-sand deniers who won’t even acknowledge the planet’s heating up. That line in the video where he says, “We know the globe is cooling; number one we know that” is from 2012, just a few years ago. We’ve known since long before then the planet is heating up, and the past few years the warming has gone into overdrive; each of the past seven months have been the hottest of those months globally. To actually say out loud that the Earth is cooling would make Orwell blush.

But he wasn’t done; he also added, “… the idea that CO2 is somehow causing global warming is on its face fraudulent.”

Holy. Baloney. He’s not just denying global warming, he’s denying a link between carbon dioxide and the planet’s increasing temperature. For the record, carbon dioxide being a greenhouse gas has been a matter of scientific fact since 1896.

The conservative party really is conservative. When it comes to science, Trump and Cramer want to wind the clock back to the nineteenth century. At least.

Cramer has made it clear that if Trump gets elected, he’ll be no friend to the environment, rolling back regulations and reversing the Clean Power Plan. Trump himself has said he’ll back out of (or “renegotiate”) the Paris climate treaty, a claim he makes based on 100 percent utter nonsense.

It couldn’t be more clear: If Trump does indeed take the White House our planet is, basically, screwed.

So, there you go. Nothing about this is at all surprising from the candidate who put away the dog whistle years ago, bringing out into the open the contempt he has for women, people of color, Muslims, gays, decorum, facts, and science. This is what the modern GOP hath wrought, and come November, hopefully they’ll reap what they’ve sown.

Update, May 20, 2016: Due to a production error, an incomplete version of this post was originally published.