Donald Trump’s Vice Presidential, and GOP right wing radical, nominee Mike Pence is best known for signing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act which codified corporate discrimination against LGBT people. Perhaps less known is his strange and his ignorant views on scientific fact. Mike Pence does not believe in evolution, he wants creationism to be taught as part of science curricula in our schools, he does not believe in global warming and, he does not accept World Heath Organization data on smoking related deaths. The League of Conservation Voters gave Pence a scoreboard of 4 % on environmental issues.
Quotes from Pence in letters that he had sent to the President on the Clean Power Plan and to the Indiana congressional delegation.
“If your administration proceeds to finalize the Clean Power Plan, and the final rule has not demonstrably and significantly improved from the proposed rule, Indiana will not comply. Our state will also reserve the right to use any legal means available to block the rule from being implemented. I believe the Clean Power Plan as proposed is a vast overreach of federal power that exceeds the EPA’s proper legal authority,” From a letter to President Obama in June of 2015.
Pence wrote in a letter to the Indiana congressional delegation to deny the Obama administration funding to implement its clean power goals. “Using the power of the purse, Congress has the ability to block or prevent implementation of the EPA’s proposed regulations on new and existing power plants. I respectfully urge you to support legislative efforts to do so,”
From TruthOut:
As a Congressman, Pence consistently voted true to his climate denial, voting to prevent the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases, to reverse President Obama’s Offshore Moratorium Act, and against enforcing limits on global carbon dioxide emissions. He was also a vocal critic of the Clean Power Plan, insisting in a letter to President Obama that Indiana would not comply. Pence joined his fellow House Republicans in opportunistically using the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill to call for energy independence built on access to all of our domestic resources, including more offshore drilling. (Never mind that Deepwater Horizon was an offshore drilling rig in US waters.) During his tenure as governor, he has overseen the expansion of the Whiting Refinery to process increasingly risky forms of fossil fuels, particularly petcoke and tar sands coming in from Canada. It is the 3rd largest tar sands refinery in the country, and its processing of petcoke, a byproduct of tar sands extraction that is cheaper and way dirtier than coal, has tripled in recent years.BuzzFeedNews has a treasure trove of old Mike Pence opinion pieces including one on Climate Change where he opens stating that “Global warming is a myth” . Grab a bag of popcorn and head on over. They are truly jaw dropping.
Chris Matthews poses some hardball questions on evolution and climate change to the presumptive nominee. Pence is quite the weasel.
x YouTube VideoMother Jones exposes Pence as the complete fraud that he is. Ouch this is going to hurt.
As governor of Indiana, Pence has continued to fight against policies intended to combat global warming. His latest battle? An effort to block President Barack Obama's Clean Power Plan, a set of Environmental Protection Agency regulations that would limit greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants. Last year, Pence called Indiana a "proud pro-coal state" on a press call, according to the Indianapolis Star. He vowed to resist the new regulations.
In June 2015, Pence sent a letter to Obama stating that Indiana would refuse to comply with the plan unless there was "significant improvement" to it. As in 2009, he warned of higher electricity prices if the proposal was implemented. He called the rules "a vast overreach of federal power."
"Your approach to energy policy places environmental concerns above all others," he wrote to Obama.
Despite Pence's objections to federal efforts to combat climate change, he apparently has no problem asking the federal government to fund green jobs in his state. As Think Progress reported, in 2009 Pence wrote a letter to then-US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu supporting a grant application submitted by an Indiana company that wanted to use algae to produce fuels. "Algae production directly addresses all of the significant challenges being faced by the US," wrote Pence, "namely domestic energy security, greenhouse gas emissions, scientific leadership in a variety of industries, and broad-based green job creation."