Less than a week before Pope Francis began his visit to Washington, DC, a group of 11 Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives signed on to a resolution to acknowledge the scientific consensus on climate change and commit to climate action as a matter of environmental stewardship.
“All too often, the conversation about appropriate and balanced environmental stewardship gets caught up in partisan politics,” said the resolution’s lead sponsor, Rep. Chris Gibson (R-NY), explaining that the environment is important in his upstate New York district. “Yet, this conversation is key to the preservation of our great country for generations to come.”
Rep. Carlos Curbelo (R-FL) “pointed to the unique effects of climate change in south Florida, where many cities are seeing frequent flooding,” The Hill reports. “Our goal with this resolution is to shift the debate from whether climate change is real to what we can do to mitigate its effects,” Curbelo said.
The resolution’s other sponsors mostly “come from swing districts, and many are vulnerable to re-election challenges next year,” Cama notes. They are Reps. David Reichert (WA), Robert Dold (IL), Richard Hanna (NY), Patrick Meehan (PA), Michael Fitzpatrick (PA), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (FL), Ryan Costello (PA), Elise Stefanik (NY), and Frank LoBiondo (NJ).
The resolution reads: “The House of Representatives commits to working constructively, using our tradition of American ingenuity, innovation, and exceptionalism, to create and support economically viable, and broadly supported private and public solutions to study and address the causes and effects of measured changes to our global and regional climates, including mitigation efforts and efforts to balance human activities that have been found to have an impact.”
