Tom Thompson is the former Chair and now a Director at Large of NC-20, a coastal development group in North Carolina which advocated for legislation to ban policy makers from using the science of climate change-based sea-level rise when making decisions about development along the North Carolina coast.
Briefly, H.B. 819 favored development interests who opposed an expert panel’s assessment that by the year 2100 sea levels would rise by over 3 feet along the coast. Instead, a coalition of science deniers and business interests advocated for an assessment that showed, at most, an 8-inch sea-level rise by 2045.
Thompson has said, “Carbon dioxide is 0.039 percent — that’s it — of the Earth’s atmosphere,” said Thompson, the economic development director for Beaufort County, N.C. “To suggest that’s having an enormous influence on the Earth’s climate is almost, you know, it’s farcical almost.” He added: “CO2 is actually good for the Earth. And that’s why we have, again, such prolific plant growth today and things like that. We’ve plotted CO2 since the [1930s] against sea-level rise. There’s no correlation. Zero correlation. They do not correlate.”
See Also: Rep. David Rouzer
Climate of Denial