Last week, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was appointed as the chair of the Subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness, giving him leading oversight of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), reported The Huffington Post.
Cruz is responsible for cutting NASA funding and leading the complete shutdown of the entire program for two weeks, along with the whole of government in October 2013. The Cruz-led shutdown kept 97 percent of NASA from working and interns were displaced during the 16 days as their housing was shut down as well.
Also more frightening, Cruz is a gigantic opponent of climate change and its study, which NASA has been one of the leading groups to conduct research on the phenomenon. Cruz used rhetoric to make it seem as if the president held NASA hostage to conduct climate research.
“One of the problems with the Obama administration is that it has degraded NASA. It has degraded for space exploration, degraded manned exploration because the Obama administration has undervalued that and shifted to funding other priorities,” said Cruz. “It shifted the funding to global warming pursuits rather than carry out NASA’s core mission.”
Cruz dismisses climate science as a hoax and “so-called scientific theory,” which is insulting to the work of scientists who actually study this subject. “Contrary to all the theories that — they they are expounding, there should have been warming over the last 15 years. It hasn’t happened,” said Cruz a year ago.
Cruz forgets or just outright ignores the fact that our summers have gotten increasingly hotter and our winters are acting more sporadically.
Cruz heading up the subcommittee that oversees NASA is but a microcosm of a greater problem. Congress is a bunch of people with law and business degrees who are deciding and overseeing things they clearly don’t understand.
They only have the interests of themselves and their donors in mind. The consensus on climate change in the scientific community is damn near unanimous; 97 percent of scientists agree that the climate is changing and that humans are probably to blame.
But for politicians like Cruz, they only act with their bank accounts and religious fervor in mind.
