The puffed-up native Chicagoan from Thursday’s post is eating her words today. More news from Andrew Schenkel and Earth Matters has informed me that Representative John Shimkus of the Prairie state is campaigning to chair the House Energy and Commerce Committee. This is significant because he apparently believes that the infallible word of God/the Bible confirms that humans will not destroy the Earth. “The Earth will end only when God declares it is time to be over,” he says, and the “Earth will not be destroyed by a flood” (I’m not sure why Shimkus included that last part, but I’m not a theologian…maybe I missed the point). The Representative quoted the relevant verses from the Bible to the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment in order to prove his assertion.

This is dismaying. It is also particularly annoying because, after explaining that the dinosaurs flourished in a lush paradise with way more carbon in their atmosphere than we have now, he adds that the employees of four closed mines in Illinois are now out of work as a direct result of the Clean Air Act of 1990 (he has a big photo to prove the miners are real).

     It is important to note that Shimkus made these statements in March 2009. He sticks by them today, mainly to support his contention that trying to avoid climate change is a waste of taxpayer dollars, because whatever is going to happen is going to happen regardless of what we do (either because of God, or because the carbon levels of the planet have been changing since it came into existence, or because of dinosaurs…again, I’m not totally clear). It is a testament to the power of the Internet (and the blogging medium in particular) that the public can be made aware of past statements like this at important moments down the line. We can’t say whether this will give pause to those charged with choosing the future committee chair, but we can be pretty sure that they have it on their radar.

At least Shimkus does believe that climate change is real. Is that really what I’m grasping at for comfort? Oy.