Abby L. Harvey
GHG Daily
1/25/2016
Climate change denial has been hot on the tongue of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) with the first caucuses looming. On Sunday morning Sanders doubled down on a statement he made during the Jan. 17 Democratic debate that Donald Trump, the front-runner in the Republican primary campaign, believes climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese.
“I would very much look forward to a race against Donald Trump, a guy who does not want to raise the minimum wage but wants to give hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks to the top two-tenths of 1 percent who thinks wages in America are too high and who thinks that climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese,” Sanders said on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” adding that “there would be nothing more in this world that I would like [than] to take on Donald Trump. We would beat him, and we would beat him badly.”
The Iowa caucus will kick off primary season on Feb. 1, followed by the New Hampshire primary on Feb. 9. According to the latest CNN Iowa caucus polling data, Sanders is leading the Democratic field in the state at 51 percent. In the same poll Trump is leading the Republican field in the state at 37 percent.
Sanders’ claim is based on a years-old tweet by Trump, which he now says was a joke. On Nov. 6, 2012, Trump tweeted: "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive."
Following Sanders’ statement during the debate, Trump responded to the claim during a Jan. 18 interview on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends”, saying, “I often joke that this is done for the benefit of China. Obviously, I joke. But this is done for the benefit of China because China does not do anything to help climate change.”
Prior to the debate, however, Trump had referred to the concept of global warming as a “hoax” on the campaign trail. As recently as Dec. 30, 2015, Trump said at a South Carolina campaign rally that "Obama’s talking about all of this with the global warming and … a lot of it’s a hoax. It’s a hoax. I mean, it’s a money-making industry, OK? It’s a hoax, a lot of it." A representative from the Trump campaign was not immediately available for comment.
Trump was not the only Republican Sanders has taken shots at recently. During a Jan. 21 town hall meeting in Wolfeboro, N.H., Sanders took on the whole party. “Today we have a major political party, it’s called the Republican Party, where not one of their candidates for president, and they have many candidates for president, not one of them has stood up and said, you know, I’ve read the literature, I’ve talked to the scientists, we’ve got a problem, climate change is real, we better do something about it. Not one,” Sanders said.
However, Sanders then suggested that climate-change denying Republicans in Congress may not believe the things they say about the climate. “Now, some may say, well, you know, Republicans are dumb or something like that. But that’s not the case. Some of you may think it’s the case, but it’s not the case. Not here,” he said, asserting he has discussed many complex scientific issues with Republicans, and climate change is the only topic on which they refuse to accept science. “They don’t go around attacking cancer researcher or Alzheimer’s researchers. But on this issue, on this issue things are very, very different. And the reason for that is a corrupt campaign finance system which tells the Republicans that if one of them were to stand up and say, you know what, climate change is real, we’ve got to do something about that, on that day they would lose their funding from the Koch brothers and the fossil fuel industry,” he said.
