The AJR6 resolution, which passed the state assembly last fall, will call on voters this November to decide whether the governor can accept federal funds without the legislature’s approval. 

The resolution will add two questions to the ballot — each focused on a proposed amendment to the state constitution.  The first will propose adding language to the state constitution that would prohibit the legislature from “delegating” its powers over state financial appropriations and spending.  

The second question will ask voters to decide whether to “prohibit the governor from allocating any federal moneys the governor accepts on behalf of the state without the approval of the legislature.” 

The resolution’s Republican sponsors cast it as a return to proper separation of powers. 

“For much of Wisconsin’s early history, lawmakers had the final say over the spending of all funds in the state treasury, no matter their source,” state Sen. Howard Marklein (R) said in January testimony in support of the bill. 

“However, legislators abandoned that important responsibility during the 1930s and 1940s as federal dollars began to compose a much larger share of state spending,” Marklein added.  

Hidden behind this neutral language is Wisconsin’s bare-knuckle partisan politics, which pit a Republican-controlled state legislature against Democratic Gov. Tony Evers — as well as the Biden administration. 

Wisconsin Republicans have opposed federal climate plans since the Inflation Reduction Act passed in 2022. That year, U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R) derided the bill as “Orwellian” and predicted that this so-called “Green Energy Fantasy” would raise energy costs rather than reducing them.  

Environmental nonprofit Evergreen Action cast the referendum as an attempt to stop the governor from rolling out renewable energy — a transition that nearly three-quarters of state voters support, according to a survey from Data for Progress. 

Courtney Bourgoin, a spokesperson for Evergreen, accused GOP lawmakers on Tuesday of trying “to undermine Wisconsin jobs and regional economic competitiveness to try to score cheap political points.” 

“Wisconsin Republicans in the legislature have proven that they’d rather see clean energy jobs in Michigan and Minnesota than in the Badger State,” Bourgoin added. 

But the impetus behind the proposed amendment goes well beyond clean energy. The resolution passed the State Assembly last year, buoyed by Republican anger about the governor’s use of federal stimulus money during the coronavirus pandemic. 

The governor made those decisions “largely on his own,” the Wisconsin Examiner reported at the time. 

That money predominantly funded emergency grant initiatives focused on aid to children and businesses, according to the Examiner. 

State Rep. Christine Sinicki (D) told the Examiner last year that the legislature couldn’t act quickly enough to use federal funds in the best way. 

If the proposed amendment had been in place during the pandemic, she said, lawmakers would have needed to return to session and expedite relevant legislation — in order to ensure “that people in the state came through strong.” 

“On the other end of a worldwide pandemic, we wouldn’t have been able to do it,” Sinicki added.  

Nearly 15 percent of Americans reject the notion that climate change is real, according to new study powered by artificial intelligence (AI). 

Decoding denialism: Researchers from the University of Michigan used both AI techniques and data from X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) to decipher how social media has fueled climate change denialism. 

• Mining social media with AI, the authors explained, allowed them to skip expensive and time-consuming polls.
• They also explored how major influencers, such as former President Trump, spread and cement climate-related misinformation.
• The researchers published their results Wednesday in the journal Scientific Reports. 

A question of reality: “The most heavily retweeted post includes one by Trump that questions climate change due to unusually cold weather in the U.S.,” corresponding author Joshua Newell, co-director of the University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Systems, said in a statement. 

• Another highly recirculated post by Trump “casts doubt on a U.N. climate report,” according to Newell. 
• “In almost half of the tweets analyzed, the most common refrain was that ‘climate change was not real,’” he added.  

Leveraging ChatGPT: Using a pre-trained language model built into the AI system ChatGPT-2, the researchers combed through more than 7.4 million tweets from 2017 to 2019. 

• Those tweets contained keywords related to climate change and were posted by 1.3 million unique users. 
• The authors then classified the tweets as “for” or “against,” to differentiate between belief in and denial of the phenomenon.  

Strength of social media: Further analysis and the use of statistical models enabled the authors to create a profile of climate change deniers at the county level.  

• This information, they explained, provided a window into the networks of social media influencers who promote climate change denial.
• Resultant insight also showed how these users exploit current world and weather events to promulgate these attitudes.   

Confirming a clash: Overall, the study revealed that 14.8 percent of Americans deny that climate change is real.  

That figure, the authors stressed, is consistent with the findings of previous national studies.  

Where is this disavowal most prominent? Climate change denialism was the highest in the central and southern regions of the U.S., according to the study. 

• Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama and North Dakota were home to the most deniers. 
• At both the state and county levels, areas with higher percentages of Republican voters had stronger correlations with climate change denialism. 

And the believers? Residents of the West and East Coasts were more likely to support the notion that climate change is real, the researchers found.   

Climate, COVID, carbon: The researchers also identified a strong association between the refusal to acknowledge climate change and low rates of COVID-19 vaccination.   

• Other influential variables included education, income and the degree to which the local economy depends on fossil fuel production.
• Residents of regions with many climate deniers may be “at risk of discounting other science-based health or safety recommendations,” lead author Dimitrios Gounaridis, a researcher at the University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Systems, said in a statement. 

But feelings are not homogenous: In fact, the authors stressed that climate change belief and denial vary significantly within states. 

• For example, in deep-rural Shasta County, Calif., denial is as high as 52 percent, even though less than 12 percent of California’s population doesn’t believe in climate change.
• And in Texas, where the average share of deniers is 21 percent, regional figures range from 13 percent in Travis County, home of Austin, to 67 percent in the Panhandle’s Hockley County. 

Polarization of climate politics: “What is scary, and somewhat disheartening, is how divided the worlds are between climate change belief and denial,” Newell said.  

“The respective X echo chambers have little communication and interaction between them,” he added.