![]() More often, VOX’s anti-environmental rhetoric has been directed at environmental ‘elites’ who it accuses of mobilizing scientific expertise to avoid political contestation and legislate against the interests of ‘the people’. It must be pointed out that VOX has rarely rejected climate science per se, as the label ‘post-truth’ would suggest. This and similar attempts to delegitimize VOX by labeling it ‘post-truth’ may lead us to miss the nuances of the party’s complex engagement with climate science. This kind of ironic humor from those with science-based beliefs is understandable given VOX’s disdain for the environmental movement, and yet it runs the risk of diverting our attention from critical developments in VOX’s climate agenda. ![]() One of the major Spanish dailies joined the fray, with an article entitled ‘One, Great, and Warm’, a play on Franco’s nationalist motto “ Una, Grande y Libre” (One, Great, and Free). “Sure, and more droughts will reduce mortality caused by drowning,” a Twitter user quipped. Unsurprisingly, VOX critics jumped at the opportunity to make fun of the party’s doubt-mongering tactics. ![]() During a parliamentary session last April, Contreras remarked that global warming may turn out not to be such a bad thing because it will “reduce mortality caused by cold weather”. The justification of one of its MPs, Francisco José Contreras, for opposing Spain’s first Climate Change Law encapsulates the party’s dismissive attitude towards the issue. Borrowing from the Trump playbook, the party has often cast climate change as a hoax and the environmental movement as a globalist plot against national sovereignty and prosperity. There is no question that, during most of its short history, VOX has spread misinformation about the severity of the threat of global warming, downplaying its dangers. A close look at the development of VOX’s climate change agenda, however, reveals a more complicated and troubling picture. This is why many analysts have interpreted its electoral success – the party is today the third largest in the Spanish parliament, having been founded in 2013 with the objective of defending the country’s national unity from the Catalan secessionist threat – as more evidence that we live in a ‘post-truth’ age, and age in which emotion carries more weight than objective facts. The Spanish right-wing populist party VOX is a well-known ‘climate change denier’.
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