The Most Anti-Science Political Candidates of Election 2012

Posted on Oct 30, 2012

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Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin.

Although many seekers of elected office are mulling over the connection between climate change and the deadly and destructive Superstorm Sandy, there are a few candidates in the U.S. who won’t be following suit.

Mother Jones has compiled its picks for the nine most anti-science candidates in America and, not surprisingly, quite a few made the list because of their vehement denials of global warming.

Those on it include Indiana GOP Senate candidate Richard Mourdock (he recently made waves, as you might recall, for saying that pregnancies that result from rape are “something that God intended” to happen), who says climate change is “the greatest hoax of all time”; Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, who calls global warming “all voodoo, nonsense, hokum, a hoax”; and Missouri Republican Senate nominee Todd Akin (the man who believes that women cannot get pregnant from a “legitimate rape”), who clearly doesn’t even understand the concept of climate change given that he said, “In Missouri when we go from winter to spring, that’s a good climate change.” 

What’s truly scary is the fact that two of the congressmen who made the roster, Akin and Rep. Paul Broun of Georgia, sit on the House’s Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, while another, Nevada Sen. Dean Heller, has a seat on the Senate’s Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee.

One person conspicuously absent from the list is Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe. The Republican was this year’s recipient of the annual Rubber Dodo Award—an anti-environmental prize handed out by the Center for Biological Diversity—because of his ardent denial of climate change.

—Posted by Tracy Bloom.

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