Are Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush smarter than a 9th Grader? Secretary of State John Kerry says “no.”
The top US envoy said lawmakers who claim they can’t assess climate change because they aren’t scientists don’t show much evidence of having been to middle School.
“I mean, it’s incomprehensible that a grownup who has been to high school and college in the United States of America disqualifies themselves because they’re not a scientist when they’ve learned that the Earth rotates on its axis but they’re not a scientist; where they’ve learned that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west and it does so 24 hours a day; and you can run the list of things that we know science tells us happens, and we accept it every single day,” he said.
“And to suggest that when more than 6,000-plus peer-reviewed studies of the world’s best scientists all lay out that this is happening and mankind is contributing to it, it seems to me that they disqualify themselves fundamentally from high public office with those kinds of statements,” Kerry added.
He made the remarks on Tuesday during an interview with MSNBC journalist Andrea Mitchell at a clean energy summit in Washington.
Kerry said he was “astounded” by the scientist line and singled out an unspecified “United States senator…or a candidate for president.”
During last year’s midterm election campaign, when asked by The Cincinnati Enquirer if climate change was a problem, McConnell replied: “I’m not a scientist.” The line, as The New York Times noted, was also used last year by House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Florida’s Republican Gov. Rick Scott. A variation of it was used last month by the now-presidential candidate Bush.
Also of note, Kerry said that Canada’s election on Monday would not impact US policy toward the Keystone XL Pipeline.
“The decision on Keystone is being based on the merits and on the countervailing balance of all the input that has come from a very exhaustive agency review,” he said. “I have said again and again I want to get that done as fast as possible, and that is very true. I want to get it done.”
Canada’s incumbent right-wing Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, was defeated by Liberal Party challenger Justin Trudeau.
Read a transcript of the Kerry-Mitchell interview here.
