CONFRONTING FUTURE TIME: SKEPTICISM AND UTILITY IN CONGRESSIONAL CLIMATE CHANGE

Climate change research has been highly politicized in the United States federal government in recent history. Considering the political persistence of rejecting anthropogenic global warming evidence despite scientific consensus on the subject, how we can reconceive the line between political and scientific debate and inquiry? My research explores potential angles on this question by examining political epistemology using the lens of recent congressional climate change discourse. Specifically, I offer rhetorical and theoretical analyses of debates that have called using scientific knowledge into question as a means of creating political knowledge on technical subjects such as climate change research. Extended political debates over the legitimacy of scientific knowledge have only shifted legislative emphasis from legal to political utility and delayed progress on related issues such as the necessary national shift to nuclear and renewable energy infrastructure. Political skepticism of scientific consensus ultimately reveals that subjective legislative reaction to objective research is a direct result of spatial, temporal, and financial conflicts of interest inherent to the legislative process. Of these, temporal conflicts of interest are most important to understanding the legislative inadequacy to represent future generations in the present.