Grist reports: Rick Santorum, who surged at the last minute to give Mitt Romney a real run for his money in Tuesday’s Iowa caucuses, is less green than his rival, and decidedly nuttier when it comes to climate change. But let’s not split hairs here. Both men will staunchly defend fossil fuels, and neither is likely to do much of anything to fight global warming.

Mitt Romney has expressed qualified concern about climate change over the years, and then vacillated about how much of it is human-caused and whether we should try to do anything about it.

No wobbling of that sort from Santorum — he’s an out-and-out denier. “There is no such thing as global warming,” he told a smiling Glenn Beck on Fox News in June 2011. That same month, he told Rush Limbaugh that climate change is a liberal conspiracy: “It’s just an excuse for more government control of your life and I’ve never been for any scheme or even accepted the junk science behind the whole narrative.”

Santorum made a point of announcing his presidential candidacy this spring near the coalfields where his grandfather worked — so that’s your first clue as to how he feels about the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. During his 16 years as a member of Congress and then senator from Pennsylvania, Santorum was a big coal booster — and he’s continued to play that role even after his defeat in a 2006 Senate race.