“The threat that climate change and unhealthy air pose to all of our futures cannot be understated,” Sen. Jay Rockefeller declared in a statement released to the press this past Monday (and posted on his official website) in response to the EPA’s announcement of new, more stringent rules regarding carbon emissions.
We don’t think that’s the sentiment our esteemed senior senator meant to express. In fact, barring a moment of unaccustomed candor or an accidental self-doping with truth serum, we’re almost certain he meant to say the exact opposite.
Sen. Rockefeller presumably meant to assert that the threat of climate change was so serious that it could not be overstated, not understated.
The fact is that virtually any threat can be under- or overstated, which makes the senator’s statement somewhat ridiculous no matter which word he used. Surely, the point he intended to make was that the threat was so serious that it could not, figuratively at least, be exaggerated (i.e., overstated).
Instead, he said, in effect – whether he meant to or not – that the threat was so insignificant that it could not be minimized (i.e., understated).
That’s quite a statement, and it’s no overstatement to say so.
Intentional or not, this statement contradicting two decades of increasingly apocalyptic global-warming propaganda was made by one of the longest-serving Democratic senators in America – not by an apostate from Albert Gore’s Climate Change Church or some other crazed denier.
Could it be that Sen. Rockefeller inadvertently told the truth?
Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin sure seems to think that the threat of climate change is overstated and that the new EPA rules are overkill.
“If these rules are put into place, our manufacturers may be forced to look overseas for more reasonable energy costs, taking good paying jobs with them and leaving hardworking West Virginians without jobs to support their families,” Tomblin warned.
And that was no misstatement, under or over.
