Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) is the junior US Senator from West Virginia. In the early 2000s, she denied that humans were the cause of global Climate Change. As a Senator in 2017, she openly supported Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, saying “President Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement is the right decision for the American economy and workers in West Virginia and across the country. West Virginians have suffered tremendous economic calamity as a result of the Obama administration’s anti-coal agenda, and President Obama should not have unilaterally committed the United States to an international climate agreement without the consent of the Senate.”
However, her thoughts on Climate Change may have evolved. Sen. Capito has recently introduced multiple bipartisan Acts alongside various Democrats in the Senate. In 2019, she and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) introduced the Clean Industrial Technology Act (CITA) that aimed to unleash innovation that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions from industrial sources and make American companies more competitive in the global economy. She says “I’m proud to again join with Senator Whitehouse to build on our long record of bipartisan work on commonsense legislation that is good for both the environment and the economy, and I will continue to make the deployment of carbon capture technologies and other innovative tools a priority. Through these efforts, we can protect jobs, encourage American innovation and industrial competitiveness, and reduce our carbon emissions.”
While in March of 2020, Capito introduced a bill called the Farmer-Driven Conservation Outcomes Act of 2020 in collaboration with Bob Casey (D-PA) which states that the USDA would need to establish a process through which it could measure, evaluate, and report on conservation program outcomes.
Friends: James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma), Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), Steve Daines (R-Montana), Shelley Moore Capito (West Virginia), and Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyoming)
Public Email form: https://www.capito.senate.gov/contact/contact-shelley
Climate of Denial