Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is in a tight race against former NFL player and Congressman Colin Allred (D-TX) to maintain his Senate seat in Texas, a red state that the Canadian-born Cruz has represented in Congress since 2013.
Cruz is one of the most recognizable and controversial lawmakers in the country, frequently pilloried by the right for his latecomer MAGA status (before he fell in line with Donald Trump, Cruz called Trump a “pathological liar”) and by the right and the left for being an opportunist — on American isolationism and various culture war battles.
One consistent Cruz target has been climate change and climate science — the Senator, who has generous donors in the fossil fuel industry, has frequently warned against “global warming alarmists” and has said “scientific evidence doesn’t support global warming.”
In 2015, Cruz told NPR that “climate change is the perfect pseudoscientific theory for a big government politician who wants more power” and complained it was the preferred fiction of “liberal politicians who want government power over the economy, the energy sector and every aspect of our lives.”
But according to Cruz’s Senate colleague Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Cruz is simply using one of the oldest political tricks and accusing liberals of what Cruz’s own backers in the fossil fuel industry are guilty of — trying to gain and maintain power, in their case through oil-friendly legislative policies that enable massive revenues, heedless of the climatological consequences.
Sharing a link to an op-ed Cruz recently published in The Hill, Whitehouse blasted Cruz for citing a source without transparency — and for failing to reveal the source’s easily traceable paid-for biases.
In the article where the Texan claims that “left-wing climate activists are trying to manipulate the justice system,” Cruz cites data from a “new oversite report” that Whitehouse flags as being propaganda from the American Energy Institute.
The “new oversight report” Cruz references is by the fossil fuel front group “American Energy Institute” that (and I quote) “is exposing the climate industrial complex [and] appreciate[s] the coverage of our work in Fox News Media.”
Trustworthy, huh? https://t.co/5k9p4D6s6c
— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) September 30, 2024
Cruz doesn’t name the organization (nor its funding), though Whitehouse reports that the American Energy Institute boasts about “exposing the climate industrial complex [and] appreciate[s] the coverage of our work in Fox News Media.” Whitehouse wonders aloud: “Trustworthy, huh?”
Just as Whitehouse questions the legitimacy of the source for Cruz’s objection, Cruz questions the legitimacy of the Climate Judiciary Project’s judicial outreach, which Cruz reduces to “courthouse bureaucrats…helping a left-wing dark money group exploit the judicial system to destroy American traditional energy companies.”
In his opinion piece, Cruz expresses “concern” that the Climate Judiciary Project has been working to educate judges on climate science, an effort The American Association for the Advancement of Science describes as providing judges with “a basic familiarity with current climate science to keep pace with the climate issues emerging in civil, regulatory, and criminal litigation.”