Moonstruck: Climate science denier Harrison Schmitt, appointed to head NM[EMNRD], believes enviros and scientists like Holdren are communists

Climate Progress
January 27, 2011

“New Mexico’s Supreme Court ordered the state records administrator yesterday to publish a rule establishing a statewide cap on emissions,” as E&E News (subs. req’d) reported today. That should be good news in a state that faces a grim future — brutal heat waves, massive wildfires, permanent Dust Bowls — in a world of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions (see “U.S. southwest could see a 60-year drought like that of 12th century — only hotter — this century” and below). Indeed, the state’s own Sandia National Laboratory analyzed projected rainfall patterns from climate change and found “over the next 40 years, New Mexico’s economic contribution to the U.S. economy could drop by $26 billion.”

But newly elected NM Gov. Susana Martinez (R) is dead set against the emissions cap. Worse, as noted earlier this month, she picked climate denier Harrison Schmitt to run “the state’s Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department, which oversees all environmental matters” in the state. Schmitt believes mainstream climate science is a conspiracy “to increase government control.”

Now it turns out former astronaut Schmitt is even more of a climate crackpot than first thought. As ThinkProgress reports (with a jaw-dropping audio):

Schmitt, a retired astronaut and former U.S. Senator, has said he believes the leaders of the environmental movement are communists, and that when these communist environmentalists are appointed to government positions, citizens need to “wake up” and “take control of their government again.” The New Mexico Independent has flagged this interview Schmitt gave to crank radio host Alex Jones in 2009:

SCHMITT: Number one we’ve been concerned with the misuse of science, but I think more fundamentally, this misuse of science has lead to politicians and ideologues to try to gain control of the American economy, and indeed the global economy, by scaring people…. I think that there are individuals, [Obama science czar John] Holdren apparently among them, a very large number who have taken — shall we say captured the environmental movement and turned it into what was previously considered the communist movement. And that’s just something that people of common sense are going to continue to have to counter and wake up enough so that they can take control of their government again. [...]" More>>>>