Alaska Beat

Lisa Murkowski and the volcano

Lisa Murkowski takes climate change seriously, she said at Election Central Tuesday night, according to a report from NPR.

"I come from a state where we see a warming," she told NPR. But as the report went on to detail, Murkowski pinned blame for the problem not on human activity but on natural phenomena -- specifically a volcano in Iceland: "The emissions that are being put in the air by that volcano are a thousand years' worth of emissions that would come from all of the vehicles, all of the manufacturing in Europe," she told NPR.

"It's simply untrue. I don't know where she gets that number from," a Princeton climate change expert told the public radio network, when it went fact-checking the claim. In fact, he said, the opposite is true: Man-made emissions are an order of magnitude higher than natural ones.

Murkowski's willingness to talk about climate change, but not to ascribe it to human activity is an approach that's common in Alaska, where the effects of climate change are felt, but the state's economy and government depends on petroleum, UAF's Scott Rupp told NPR.

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