Senate Budget Committee Hearing: JC responds
Posted on March 26, 2023 by curryja | 58 Comments
by Judith Curry
Last week’s Hearing was a sad example of what passes for debate and deliberations by the U.S. Senate. In any event, it provides an interesting case study of why the U.S. cannot bridge the partisan divide and figure out how to deal sensibly with the climate change issue.
In case you missed it, the Chair of the Senate Budget, Sheldon Whitehouse, has immortalized on youtube his questioning of me at the end of the Hearing: Chairman Whitehouse Presses GOP Witness in Budget Hearing on Climate Change and Insurance Markets.
I expected SW to go after me, which he has often done to Republican witnesses. In my written testimony, I added a paragraph at the end of my biosketch to defuse any accusations of being in the pocket of ‘big oil.’ When SW introduced the witnesses, he thanked each one and said he was looking forward to their testimony – including the other Republican witness. In introducing me, he simply stated my name and my positions. The writing was on the wall from the very beginning of the Hearing. However, I did not expect the inanity that ensued.
It seems that Senator Whitehouse thought that his grilling of me was some sort magnificent ‘takedown’: mischaracterizing things that I had written over a decade ago, out of context references to my use of alarmist trigger words “hoax” and “corrupt” in interviews and obscure blog posts, unpublished graphs that I have never seen before, words of ‘wisdom’ from Exxon in the 1960’s, etc.
Apart from the issue that almost none of this had anything to do with my testimony and much of the time I had no idea what he was talking about, he gave me about 30 seconds to respond to each of these, saying that I could respond later in writing. The day after the Hearing, his staffer emailed me with follow up questions from Senator Grassley (see my responses: Judith Curry response to Senator Grassley questions) and that “I will also be sending you a transcript of your remarks from the hearing in the next few days, to make minor edits to” – I have yet to receive this transcript.
https://judithcurry.com/2023/03/26/senate-budget-committee-hearing-jc-responds/
