Oh man, these guys are dumb

We all know that state legislatures are often the stepping stones for ambitious pols who want to go work at the Capitol Building in DC (3 of 7 Democrats running this year for US District One in Honolulu are State Senators or Representatives; another 3 are City Councilmembers). It’s often useful to point out how absolutely insane some of the junior varsity at the state level is.

For example, a Republican state senator in Kentucky recently said this:

“As you sit there in your chair with your data, we sit up here in ours with our data and our constituents and stuff behind us. I don’t want to get into the debate about climate change, but I will simply point out that I think in academia we all agree that the temperature on Mars is exactly as it is here. Nobody will dispute that,” said the senator in a video posted by the weekly publication. “Yet there are no coal mines on Mars. There are no factories on Mars that I’m aware of.”

As several people have pointed out, there’s so much wrong with this it’s hilarious. First off, no, the temperatures on the two planets are greatly different (Earth: average 58 degrees Fahrenheit; Mars: average minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit). Then, despite his “in academia we” statement, he’s not an academic. He got a BA in political science from the U of Kentucky in 1991 and put it to work owning a mining company called Mohawk Energy. The coal mine business has to do, I think, with the evidence that burning coal increases greenhouse gases and thus raises global warming, but “MARS isn’t warming and it doesn’t have coal mines” or something.

This guy just might want to run for US Representative one day, so keep his idiocy in mind.