Former Vice President Al Gore claimed Republican politicians have been “cowed into abandoning” their belief in climate change by the Koch brothers and other polluting GOP donors.
Gore spoke with former Obama senior adviser David Axelrod at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics on Monday. The “Inconvenient Truth” star blasted Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul for being skeptical of climate change prediction models, but also took broader aim at Paul’s party as a whole.
“There is an enforced orthodoxy in the Republican Party,” Gore asserted. “Not too many years ago, John McCain ran on a platform acknowledging the climate crisis and making proposals to solve it. The nominee last time — when Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts, same thing. He acknowledged it, took steps to try to deal with it. And there were a number of Republicans who took that position.”
“I don’t think it’s particularly complicated why they have all been cowed into abandoning that position,” he continued. “They will face primary opponents, financed by the Koch brothers and other who are part of their group, if they even breathe the slightest breath of sympathy for the truth about climate science. It’s not really that complicated.”
“Anyone who wants to set his or her aspirations on the Republican nomination for the presidency in 2016 already knows that they can’t possibly cross the Koch brothers and the others that are part of that group,” Gore alleged. “They’re large carbon polluters AND ideological anti-statists, who are really terrified that the government will do anything new . . . They wanna shrink the government to where it can be drowned in a bathtub.”
WATCH:
[h/t Mediaite]
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