#479: Mike Beard (with Joe Read)

Mike Beard is a member of Minnesota House of Representatives who does not think we have to worry about natural resources since “God is not capricious. He's given us a creation that is dynamically stable. We are not going to run out of anything.” It may be worth pointing out that the God of the old Testament was not obviously not capricious, and the claim appears to commit Beard to famine-denialism. He was, of course, primarily concerned with environmentalism, and admitted – with pride – that he had learned his climate science from “conservative blog sites”.

He has also provided this bizarre call for optimism about the future: “How did Hiroshima and Nagasaki work out? We destroyed that, but here we are, 60 years later and they are tremendously effective and livable cities. Yes, it was pretty horrible. But, can we recover? Of course we can.”

Beard is apparently cut from the same cloth as Montana state senator Joe Read, who wanted to legislate laws of nature by putting climatedenial into the state laws with the justification that “the legislature finds: (a) global warming is beneficial to the welfare and business climate of Montana.” This, apparently, is how science works in the wingnut mind.

Diagnosis: How do these people get elected? It is not just that Beard is a fundamentalist and has the fundamentalist’s aptitude for reason and truth, he is quite obviously borderline cognitively impaired as well.