How the Republicans Censored Barack Obama on Climate

If there is one scientific certainty about global warming, it’s that, in the U.S., it’s a source of powerful headaches for Republicans. Proof of this can be found in the link posted on Wednesday, January 21 by the site ThinkProgress: The video commentary of President Obama’s State of the Union address, posted the previous day by Republican John Boehner, speaker of the House of Representatives, has some minor cuts, apparently with the aim of removing the passages on climate. The majority party’s scissors went into action after 43 minutes and 25 seconds and rid the presidential speech of a few sentences, the intolerable character of which is not immediately obvious.

“Some folks try to dodge the evidence by saying they’re not scientists; that we don’t have enough information to act,” said Barack Obama. “… The best scientists in the world are telling us that our activities are changing the climate, and if we do not act forcefully, we’ll continue to see rising oceans, longer, hotter heat waves, dangerous droughts and floods, and massive disruptions that can trigger greater migration, conflict, and hunger around the globe.” [http://www.npr.org/2015/01/20/378680818/transcript-president-obamas-state-of-the-union-address]

“Inadvertence”

When questioned by ThinkProgress, Mr. Boehner’s spokesman pled “inadvertence,” suggesting that the cut could even be the fault of YouTube — which, in this unlikely event, had also censored a second passage, where the U.S. president spoke of respect for “human dignity” and called for prohibiting torture in the U.S. [http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/01/21/3613732/you-cant-handle-the-truth/]

However, it’s the climate issue that has a hold on Republicans’ brains, notably because of the discord between the White House and Congress over constructing the Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring oil extracted from Canadian sands to the United States. Undoubtedly trying to ridicule their opponents, Democratic senators on January 21 filed a draft resolution specifying that climate change is “real and not a hoax.” [http://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/senate-climate-change-vote-114463.html]

The Republican Party did not take the bait and voted overwhelmingly for the resolution. But a second motion, specifying this time that global warming is a result of human activities, was rejected. Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who incidentally is chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, justified his opposition by saying that the climate is always changing, citing “Biblical evidence” to support his remarks. [http://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/senate-climate-change-vote-114463.html]