Rob Bishop (R-UT) Finds The True Villian Behind Global Warming - Patagonia
On Wednesday morning, the House Natural Resources Committee held its first hearing on climate change in eight years. It was as unremarkable as you’d expect from a dry political proceeding. Except for one thing: Rob Bishop’s precisely five-minute-long rant about Patagonia. For some background: Bishop spent the last four years serving as chairperson of the committee. When Democrats took control of the House of Representatives in January, Arizona’s Raul Grijalva replaced him, but Bishop still serves as the committee’s ranking member.
It’s worth recapping Bishop’s longstanding beef with the socially responsible outdoor clothing brand. Bishop’s home state of Utah is blessed with an extraordinary abundance of natural wonders and public lands. But the state’s conservative lawmakers are hellbent on paving all of that over in order to make way for maximal extraction of oil and gas. It’s a crusade the Salt Lake Tribune has described as “quixotic,” because that move would actually cost the state more money than it currently earns from its public lands. In fact, the oil and gas industries net Utah fewer jobs and less revenue than the outdoor recreation industry, which obviously relies on, well, the outdoors. It seems fairly obvious that political donations from oil and gas account for the disparity between the actions of Utah’s politicians and the interests of the state’s citizens.
All that came to a head in 2017 when Patagonia, along with a number of other gear companies, pulled out of the big Outdoor Retailer trade show in Salt Lake City in protest of the state’s anti-public lands and anti-environment policies, prompting the show's eventual exodus to Denver. Around the same time, Patagonia was leading many advocacy efforts to protect the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments (both of which are in Utah) from the Trump administration’s efforts to shrink them. When the shrinkage went forward, Patagonia painted its website black and splattered the message “The President Stole Your Land,” across the Internet. In response, Bishop’s Natural Resources Committee took the unprecedented, and possibly illegal, step of launching a social media campaign carrying the message, “Patagonia Is Lying To You.”
Phew. Onto today. In the hearing, members of the Natural Resources Committee solicited the testimony of various experts. One of those was Hans Cole, Patagonia's director of Environmental Campaigns and Advocacy. I’ll embed his testimony below, but if you’ve devoted even five minutes of time to read about climate change at any point in the last couple of decades, you don’t really need to watch it. He basically says climate change is bad, his company is committed to switching to renewable energy sources in order to do its part, and he encourages the government to do the same. There’s nothing new or controversial here.
EDIT
https://www.outsideonline.com/2390213/rob-bishop-blames-patagonia-climate-change