Mike Johnson’s Dad Sought His Help to Stop a Toxic Burn Pit Close to Home. Johnson Refused.

House Speaker Mike Johnson speaks to reporters at the Capitol on Tuesday, following a meeting with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

This story was originally published by the Guardian and appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. 

Mike Johnson was a few months away from assuming elected office in late 2014 when he was confronted with an impassioned appeal by the man he would later pay tribute to in his first speech as House speaker: his late father, Patrick.

The elder Johnson, a former firefighter in the Louisiana city of Shreveport, had survived a near fatal industrial explosion when Mike was 12 years old, a defining event in both men’s lives. He had just joined a local community environmental group working to fight against US government plans to burn—in the open air—over 15 million pounds of toxic munitions. It had thrust Patrick and his future wife Janis Gabriel on to the frontlines of Louisiana environmental advocacy.

As authorities were on the verge of approving the “open burn,” which would have sent vast quantities of known carcinogens into the air, Patrick and Janis turned to the most influential person they knew.

Then an ambitious, right-wing constitutional lawyer, Mike Johnson would in a matter of weeks fill the vacancy for Louisiana’s eighth state legislative district—whose borders are just 20 miles from Camp Minden, a military base where the illegal munitions dump—the largest in US history—was located. A small amount of the munitions had spontaneously exploded two years before, causing a four mile blast radius.

The pair drove to Mike Johnson’s legal offices in the late morning, Gabriel recalled, and Patrick Johnson explained to his son the immediate environmental and health dangers the toxic dump posed, not only to residents in the immediate vicinity but to members of the Johnson family living in the region.

“His father and I went to him and said: ‘Mike, you need to get involved in this, this is really important. Your family really lives at ground zero,’” Gabriel said in an interview with the Guardian. “We basically begged him to say something, to someone, somewhere.”

A terse back and forth followed, she said. “He just wasn’t interested,” Gabriel said. “He had other things to do. He was never interested in environmental things.”

The couple left deeply disappointed. “It just blew my mind that he wouldn’t give five minutes of his time to the effort,” she said. “He basically shut us down.”

A spokesperson for Johnson said he “disputes this characterization as described” but did not respond to an invitation to elaborate further.

Gabriel, 72, has thought about this failed appeal to Johnson repeatedly in recent months, ever since he was thrust from relative obscurity to the House speakership in October.

A denier of climate science, Mike Johnson has spoken about how his evangelical faith has shaped his political worldview. According to a broad examination of his past statements, Johnson’s anti-climate advocacy often bears the hallmarks of a Christian fundamentalism linked to creationism.

Louisiana’s fourth congressional district, which includes Camp Minden, has long voted staunchly Republican, but many residents still hold deep concerns about pollution and the climate crisis. In a year the district experienced record heat and a number of climate-related disasters, some say their representative in Washington, who is now second in line to the presidency, is fundamentally failing them.

Mike Johnson’s views on climate change became publicly apparent in 2017, just five months into his first term in the US Congress. Asked how he felt about the climate crisis by a constituent at a rowdy town hall meeting in Shreveport, Johnson launched into a critique of climate change data, saying he had also seen “the data on the other side.”

“The climate is changing, but the question is: is the climate changing because of the natural cycles of the atmosphere over the span of history, or is it changing because we drive SUVs?

“I don’t believe in the latter. I don’t think that’s the primary driver.”

Some attendees booed.

Two years later, Johnson—who has received almost $350,000 in political donations from the oil and gas industry since his election in 2016—led the Republican Study Committee as it lobbied against progressive Democratic efforts to implement a Green New Deal. Johnson denounced the sweeping federal blueprint for climate action as a “guise to usher in the principles of socialism” and create a system of “full government control.”

In Louisiana, which is economically dependent on the oil and gas industry, the remarks were consistent with the Republican party’s support for fossil fuels.

But to experts who study the Christian fundamentalist movement of creationism, the comments revealed a worldview that falls far outside traditional Republican pro-industry norms. They see the remarks, and Johnson’s rejection of climate science, as evidence of Johnson’s adherence to young-Earth creationist beliefs, including the presumption that the Earth is just 6,000 years old.