Seventeen state legislators, all Democrats, today attacked Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s legal challenges of a federal global-warming decision.
"There are plenty of reasons to be upset about federal overreach, but their efforts to fight pollution should not be one of them," said Del. Albert C. Pollard Jr., D-Lancaster.
Pollard and other lawmaker spoke at a news conference in the Capitol.
Cuccinelli filed two legal actions last month seeking to block a federal move toward regulating gases linked to global warming. Cuccinelli said the Environmental Protection Agency has relied on faulty data, and he said new regulations could hurt jobs.
The attorney general has no plans to withdraw the challenges, Cuccinelli spokesman Brian J. Gottstein said.
Cuccinelli believes "global warming is not settled science" and says possible EPA regulations to address climate change would cost businesses and individuals far more than the expense of the challenges, Gottstein said.
The lawmakers today said the effort was a waste of taxpayers’ dollars and an attack on established climate science.
At the news conference, Bruce A. Wielicki, senior scientist for earth sciences at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, said science organizations worldwide support the notion that people are causing the planet to warm.
Some recently discovered inaccuracies in a key 2007 global-warming report — seized upon by skeptics as evidence against global warming — do not change that overwhelming consensus of climate scientists, Wielicki said. He noted that he was speaking on his own, not for NASA.
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