Opinion: Chuck Edwards is a climate change denier taking a dangerous and sophomoric stance
Early last month I trekked with my wife and 10-year-old daughter to Hendersonville for Chuck Edwards’ pep rally — I mean town hall. Set in a cozy amphitheater at Blue Ridge Community College, I had no idea that I was attending an event where almost everyone in attendance was there to chuckle and clap at every predictable punch line offered by our right-wing N.C. 11 congressman.
I quickly realized that my family was in the vast minority when the crowd offered loud applause at Edwards’ opening brag about Republicans passing a bill to rescind funding for the IRS that was included in the Inflation Reduction Act, because everyone knows that the IRS would use that funding to “come after regular folks like you and me.”
One of the first questions from the audience that moderator Victoria Dunkle (former WLOS news anchor) pulled out of the jar was about climate change. Here, Edwards immediately turned folksy, offering “wisdom” supplied by his grandmother: “My grandmother always said, ‘You can’t change the weather.’” Enthusiastic applause followed. (It is worth noting that, in the car ride back up I-26, my daughter said, “Dad, we learned the difference between weather and climate in third grade!”)
Edwards continued by saying he knows there are people who want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but he does not like the government cramming down everyone’s throats mandates to reduce the emissions. I had heard enough of the knowing chuckles and clapping by this point, so I called out, “So why are you cramming climate change down the throats of our young people?” Of course, Edwards did not want to deal with any real feedback from little common constituents in his mostly friendly audience, and he quickly asked me to quiet down and added, “This is not a debate.”
Sure, he does not want to debate climate change, because he is completely in line with the far right-wing stance of “U.S. energy dominance,” which means continuing to extract and burn dirty fossil fuels decades into the future. All the while our planet continues warming rapidly, with extreme events such as bomb cyclones and months-long wildfires becoming more commonplace by the day.
When I arranged to meet with Edwards nearly a year ago, in his Hendersonville office, the nine high school students I was accompanying thoughtfully prepared two main questions for Edwards, one about climate change and one about gun control. On climate change, he replied something about the warming being “only” 1 degree anyway (the planet has warmed by more than 1 degree Celsius, or about 2 degrees Fahrenheit, mostly since about 1975), and then mumbled that some rounding errors in the past may have resulted in the numerical differences we see today (they’re not).
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Make no mistake about it: Edwards is a climate change denier, in a world where there are few of them left. It’s a dangerous and sophomoric stance to argue against the overwhelming science that says the burning of fossil fuels is definitively leading to the warming of our planet, and then to argue for the burning of even more fossil fuels.
I’ve volunteered in advocacy and lobbying efforts for real action on climate change for nearly a decade now, almost always in a non-partisan manner, hoping that Republicans would some day turn the corner on this existential subject and support real and lasting change. While some Republicans may one day get there, I am currently not at all optimistic about this outcome, and I am nearly 100% positive that Chuck Edwards will not be one of the champions for creating a stable climate for current and future generations.
I am now convinced that the only course of action is to use our voices and hold these elected officials accountable by raising “good trouble” (in the words of the late Congressman John Lewis), and then voting them out of office, replacing them with with thinking, compassionate, intelligent representatives who will vote their conscience and will follow the science, instead of succumbing to the talking points of the far right.
Chuck Edwards tries to pass himself off as a charming, down-to-earth representative looking after his constituents, but make no mistake about it: Press him on any real issue, and his stance will be farther to the right than most of us in NC 11 are on issues such as climate change, reasonable gun control, reproductive rights, etc. It’s time for us to elect an actual representative of the people, one who works for all of us on real, meaningful change for the betterment of all.
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Michael Hill is a high school mathematics and environmental science teacher.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Opinion: Chuck Edwards denies climate change ignores science
