Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) has been a U.S. Senator from Arkansas since 2014. He previously represented Arkansas’s 4th District in the U.S. House of Representatives. He serves on four Senate committees, including Committee on Armed Services, the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, The Committee on Intelligence, and the Joint Economic Committee.
Tom Cotton on Climate Change
Sen. Cotton has a history of publicly denying climate change. At an energy policy panel in 2014, Cotton stated, “…for the last 16 years the earth’s temperature has not warmed… That’s the facts… Now, there’s no doubt that the temperature has risen over the past 150, 200 years. It’s most likely that human activity has contributed to some of that.”
In 2015, Tom Cotton voted in support of S.J. Res. 24, legislation that would nullify the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan, which was one of the first nation-wide limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, and key climate change policy.
Sen. Cotton was a critic of the Green New Deal shortly after its release in 2019. He attacked the proposal by saying “It’s pretty remarkable that when these Democrats put out the Green New Deal last week that you had many Democrats running for president leap onto a proposal that was going to confiscate every privately owned vehicle in America within a decade and ban air travel so we could all drive or ride around on high speed light rail, supposedly powered by unicorn tears… [Democrats] believe that Americans driving around in trucks on farms, or commuting from the suburbs where they can have a decent home into the city to work are a fundamental threat to the world, and they have to have the power and the control of those Americans’ lives to implement their radical vision for humanity.”
Tom Cotton and Friends
Tom Cotton’s 2014 Senate campaign was endorsed by Club For Growth, an conservative organization that opposes climate reform. They were one of the organizations that supported President Trump’s decision to exit the Paris Agreement.
His campaign was also endorsed by Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who publicly denied human-cause climate change on an ABC News Broadcast in 2014. Rubio stated, “I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it… I think severe weather has been a fact of life on Earth since man started recording history.” During his presidential campaign in 2016, when questioned on if he is going to “embrace the science” of climate change, Sen. Rubio responded by saying that while humans are contributing to what’s happening in our climate, there’s no consensus on how much of the changes that are going on are due to human activity.
Tom Cotton and Science Denial
As the coronavirus continues to spread, Sen. Cotton continues to speak out without regard to science or facts, and willing to use rumors surrounding a global crisis to attack his geo-political opponents. “We don’t know where it originated,” Cotton said on Fox News on Sunday. “But we do know we have to get to the bottom of that. We also know that just a few miles away from that food market is China’s only biosafety level 4 super laboratory that researches human infectious diseases.”
See also: Dan Sullivan (R-AK), James Inhofe (R-OK), Steve Chabot (R-OH, 1st District)
Climate of Denial